Affine formation maneuver control of underactuated surface vessels: Guaranteed safety under moving obstacles in narrow channels

This research tackles the challenge of dynamic formation control and collision avoidance in underactuated surface vessels (USVs). Firstly, an affine transformation is employed to implement arbitrary configuration transformations within the multi-USV system. Secondly, by considering both distances and velocities between USVs and obstacles, a novel collision avoidance scheme is proposed based on conventional distance-based artificial potential field methods. This method, building on traditional distance-based artificial potential fields, offers a more precise assessment of collision risks, thereby notably shrinking the potential collision zones. Such refinement leads to reduced energy consumption and minimizes disruption to formation integrity. Thirdly, an anti-perturbation formation maneuver safety control scheme is introduced to achieve a time-varying target formation without collisions, ensuring that local position tracking errors remain bounded. The effectiveness of the proposed approaches is substantiated through comprehensive theoretical analysis and extensive numerical simulations, underscoring their practical applicability. •This paper proposes a practical distributed USV formation framework designed to address challenges posed by model uncertainties and environmental disturbances encountered during environmental surveys.•An anti-perturbation formation maneuver safety controller is proposed to compensate for the lumped disturbances and achieve maneuver control without collision.•The proposed potential field function serves as a dynamic mechanism for tuning repulsive forces, leveraging real-time data on the relative distances and velocities between USVs and obstacles.