Hierarchical Control Design for the Cooperative Target Enclosing Motion of Unmanned Surface Vehicle

In this paper, a practical hierarchical control strategy for the multiple unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) is developed to address the cooperative target enclosing problem under the underactuated characteristics of USVs. Two subsystems are designed to deal with the whole motion task in kinematics and in dynamics, respectively. Firstly, in the cooperative target enclosing subsystem, a cooperative control law considering the neighbor states is designed to achieve the target enclosing motion. Subsequently, in the second dynamics control subsystem, the control input of the USV are designed to guarantee the good tracking of the reference signals, which is generated by the cooperative target enclosing subsystem. The simulation is carried out in the MATLAB/Simulink environment, and the results verify the effectiveness of the proposed cooperative target enclosing control framework.