An Overview of Recent Advances in Coordinated Control of Multiple Autonomous Surface Vehicles

Autonomous surface vehicles (ASVs) are marine vessels capable of performing various marine operations without a crew in a variety of cluttered and hostile water/ocean environments. For complex missions, there are increasing needs for deploying a fleet of ASVs instead of a single one to complete difficult tasks. Cooperative operations with a fleet of ASVs offer great advantages with enhanced capability and efficacy. Despite various application potentials, coordinated motion control of ASVs pose great challenges due to the multiplicity of ASVs, complexity of intravehicle interactions and fleet formation with collision avoidance requirements, and scarcity of communication bandwidths in sea environments. Coordinated control of multiple ASVs has received considerable attention in the last decade. This article provides an overview of recent advances in coordinated control of multiple ASVs. First, some challenging issues and scenarios in motion control of ASVs are presented. Next, coordinated control architecture and methods of multiple ASVs are briefly discussed. Then, recent results on trajectory-guided, path-guided, and target-guided coordinated control of multiple ASVs are reviewed in detail. Finally, several theoretical and technical issues are suggested to direct future investigations including network-based coordination, event-triggered coordination, collision-free coordination, optimization-based coordination, data-driven coordination of ASVs, and task-region-oriented coordination of multiple ASVs and autonomous underwater vehicles.