Cooperative Multiple Formation Control of Autonomous Marine Vehicles

The general problem of Cooperative Control of multiple heterogeneous vehicles in the presence of severe communication constraints and external disturbances is pervasive in a large spectrum of scientific and commercial applications where groups of vehicles are required to carry out missions that cannot possible be achieved with a single vehicle [1] . It is important to stress that cooperation in the sense adopted here cannot be reduced to scheduling the actions of each and every vehicle in a group using a common time frame according to some pre-defined plan and dispatching specific sub-missions to each vehicle, which will then be asked to execute a specific task with only scarce information being exchanged among the group (.e.g. fast covering of the seabed by using a group of vehicles, each one of them in charge of acquiring visual and acoustic data over specific portions of the terrain). In the scope of many practical scientific and practical applications, far more complex missions must be addressed that require the concerted operation of groups of vehicles towards completion of a given goal (for example, cooperative motion control of ASVs and AUVs for acoustic and visual surveying). In this situation, the vehicles must necessarily exchange motion-related or environmental-related information parsimoniously and fulfil the mission objectives by adopting a distributed (non-centralized) decision architecture.