Interception Decision and Control for the Formation of Surface Vehicles

Faced with multiple attackers, effective formation cooperation of autonomous surface vehicles (ASVs) is of practical importance but rarely considered. This paper investigates such a problem in the presence of uncertainties, disturbances and actuator faults. Based on graph theory and backstepping technique, a novel adaptive fault-tolerant formation cooperation scheme is developed for ASVs. In this scheme, there is a distributed interception assignment strategy together with a resilient dual-mode controller. The formation tracking mode and target interception mode share the same control structure with an adaptive fault compensation design. An interception assignment strategy using consensus-based auction algorithm is utilized to guide the switching of these two control modes. It is shown that desired formation configurations are obtained and attackers are intercepted simultaneously with the aid of the proposed scheme if the original topology of ASVs is connected and some conditions are satisfied.