Hybrid Framework for Guidance and Navigation of Multiple Unmanned Surface Vehicles in a Practical Marine Environment

Formation control and cooperative motion planning are two major research areas currently being used in multi robot motion planning and coordination. The current study proposes a hybrid framework for guidance and navigation of swarm of unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) by combining the key characteristics of formation control and cooperative motion planning. In this framework, two layers of offline planning and online planning are integrated and applied on a practical marine environment. In offline planning, three different paths in three different environmental scenarios are generated from a constrained A* path planning approach, which are later smoothed using a spline. This optimal trajectory is fed as an input for the online planning where virtual target based multi-agent guidance framework is used to navigate the swarm of USVs. This virtual target approach combined with a potential theory based swarm aggregation technique provides a robust methodology of global and local collision avoidance based on known positions of the USVs. The combined approach is evaluated with the different number of USVs and in different environmental scenarios to understand the effectiveness of the approach from the perspective of practicality, safety and robustness.