Constrained Safe Cooperative Maneuvering of Autonomous Surface Vehicles: A Control Barrier Function Approach

This article investigates a constrained safe cooperative maneuvering method for a group of autonomous surface vehicles (ASVs) with performance-quantized indices in an obstacle-loaded environment. Specifically, an avoidance-tolerant prescribed performance (ATPP) with one-sided tunnel bounds is designed to predetermine the cooperative maneuvering performance of multiple ASVs. Next, an auxiliary system is constructed to modify performance bounds of ATPP for tolerating possible collision avoidance actions of ASVs. In the guidance loop, nominal surge and yaw guidance laws are developed using the ATPP-based transformed relative distance and heading errors. A barrier-certified yaw velocity protocol is proposed by formulating a quadratic optimization problem, which unifies the nominal yaw guidance law and CBF-based collision-free constraints. In the control loop, two prescribed-time disturbance observers (PTDOs) are devised to estimate unknown external disturbances in the surge and yaw directions. The antidisturbance control laws are designed to track the guidance signals. By the stability and safety analysis, it is proved that error signals of the proposed closed-loop system are bounded and the multi-ASV system is input-to-state safe. Finally, simulation results are used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the presented constrained safe cooperative maneuvering method.