Optimized Communication Aided Formation Control of Marine Vehicles Using Integral Model Predictive Control

The communication at sea is expensive and unreliable due to the harsh marine environment. This paper is concerned with the problems of communication cost, the limited communication range, and the collision avoidance, which are normally ignored in existing results of formation control of multi-ship. First, an optimization process is incorporated into the design of distributed guidance system to find the minimum cost arborescence of communication topology, which gives aid to mitigate the communication cost. Second, to ensure connectivity preservation and collision avoidance, formation tracking control problem of multi-ship is transformed into the quadratic programming problem with output constraints by model predictive control. Third, an integral part is added into model predictive control to handle the steady tracking error, known as the integral model predictive control (IMPC). Finally, the effectiveness of the controller is verified by conducting multiple comparative simulations.