Formation control of multiple underactuated surface vessels

The formation control of a group of underactuated surface vessels has been considered. With the aid of results from graph theory, cooperative control laws are proposed using the relative information between neighbors. The proposed control laws can make a group of surface vessels converges to a desired stationary formation and have the same orientations. Stability of the closed-loop system with time delay in the controllers is also discussed. Effectiveness of the proposed results is verified by simulation results.