Coordinated adaptive control for coordinated path-following surface vessels with a time-invariant orbital velocity

This article considers the problem of directing a family of fully actuated surface vessels to cooperatively follow a set of convex and closed orbits with a time-invariant reference orbital velocity and maintain attitude synchronization. A consensus-based adaptive control law under a bidirectional communication topology is proposed to estimate the reference orbital velocity so that the restriction that every vessel in the family must have access to the reference in the previous literature can be removed. The assumption of nonzero total linear speed of each vessel is removed by the use of potential function. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.