Cooperative operation of autonomous surface vehicles for maintaining formation in complex marine environment

A system for motion-planning, collision avoidance, guidance and control of an autonomous surface vehicles formation, navigating in complex marine environment is presented. The motion-planning unit, which is based in angle-guidance fast-marching square method, is specially developed for operation in dynamic and static environments. The collision avoidance unit is based in fuzzy-logic formulation, the guidance unit uses the vector-field guidance formulation and the control unit is composed by a PID heading controller and a speed controller. The leader-follower's configuration is used for cooperative operation. A set of numerical simulations are carried out for a team of three autonomous surface vehicles navigating in a complex maritime environment including static and dynamic obstacles and the results show good performance of the system.