ESO-based guidance law for distributed path maneuvering of multiple autonomous surface vehicles with a time-varying formation

This chapter is concerned with the distributed guidance law design for cooperative path maneuvering of multiple autonomous surface vehicles guided by one parameterized path. At first, distributed guidance laws based on neighboring information are proposed for fully-actuated autonomous surface vehicles over a directed network where an observer is used to estimate the unknown velocity information of neighboring surface vehicles and the derivatives of relative deviations. Then, this work is extended to an underactuated case. For both cases, it is proven that the error signals in the guidance loop are input-to-state stable via cascade stability analysis. Moreover, the prescribed guidance signals are bounded in spite of any initial positions, thereby facilitating practical implementations. Simulation results illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed distributed guidance law for cooperative path maneuvering of fully-actuated and underactuated autonomous surface vehicles.