Tracking Control of Cooperative Marine Vehicles Under Hard and Soft Constraints

We solve the tracking-in-formation problem for a group of underactuated autonomous marine vehicles interconnected over a directed topology. The agents are subject to
hard
inter-agent constraints, i.e. connectivity maintenance and collision avoidance, and
soft
constraints, specifically on the non-negativity of the surge velocity, as well as to constant disturbances in the form of unknown ocean currents. The control approach is based on an input-output feedback linearization for marine vehicles and on the edge-based framework for multi-agent consensus under constraints. We establish
almost-everywhere
uniform asymptotic stability of the output dynamics with guaranteed respect of the constraints. High-fidelity simulations are provided to illustrate our results.