Distributed Connectivity Keeping Supervision Scheme with Collision and Obstacle Avoidance Requirements

This paper investigates a connectivity preserving coordination problem for a group of dynamically decoupled fully actuated Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs) that are subject to both collision and obstacle avoidance constraints. An existing supervision scheme based on Distributed Command Governor ideas is here extended in order to obtain motion coordination of vehicles. To this end, the proposed method enforces the existence of a specific minimum spanning tree at each time instant while fulfilling obstacle avoidance and collision avoidance constraints, by using a separation hyperplane and solving online a linearly constrained optimization problem involving a mixture of continuous and integer variables. Conditions that formally ensure the feasibility of the proposed strategy are included along with simulations that show the effectiveness of the proposed method.