Equilateral Triangular Formation of Unmanned Surface Vehicles for Target Tracking with Collision Avoidance*

In this paper, the problem of collaborative tracking of a surface target with multiple unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) is studied. Distance-based formation tracking control with collision avoidance is employed to encompass the target with the USVs in the desired formation. An additional term, the “rotational force” is introduced to the control law so that the formation achieves a desired relative orientation while tracking the target in order to avoid collisions between the USVs and the target. The effectiveness of the proposed control law for avoiding collisions between the USVs and the target and the convergence property are shown by simulation.