Prescribed-Time Bearing-Based Formation Control of Underactuated ASVs Under External Disturbance

This brief presents a prescribed-time bearing-based formation control scheme for underactuated autonomous surface vessels (ASVs) subject to external disturbances. Compared with the existing methods, our method enables the ASV swarm to maneuver with flexible size scaling and user-defined convergence time. Assuming that the underlying graph of ASV swarm satisfies the leader-first follower structure, a hierarchical formation protocol is designed. We firstly design a prescribed-time disturbance observer to estimate the external disturbance. On this basis, a bearing-based formation control law is integrated such that the vessels achieve the target formation within user-defined time. Rigorous theoretical stability analysis and comparative simulation results are presented to substantiate the effectiveness of the proposed method.