Formation Control for Multiple USVs Under Aperiodic Sampling and Communication Delays
Year: 2026
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: Cooperative maritime tasks such as distributed monitoring, escorting, and adaptive sampling require multiple USVs to maintain prescribed relative positions under limited inter-vessel communication. In sea-surface wireless networks, update intervals are often nonuniform and transmitted neighbor states arrive late. These two effects break the periodic-update assumption used in many formation controllers. This paper studies the leader-follower formation control problem for multiple USVs under communication delays and aperiodic sampling. An error dynamic model is established by considering communication delay, non-periodic sampling, and attitude-position coupling. A delay-dependent Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional is constructed to analyze system stability, and sufficient conditions are derived to ensure asymptotic convergence of the formation errors. These conditions are expressed in terms of linear matrix inequalities (LMIs), which can be used to compute the controller gains. In the simulation with one leader and four followers, the position, heading, and velocity errors decay to zero under a 0.15 s delay and nonuniform updates between 0.05 s and 0.30 s. The formation errors converge asymptotically, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed method under realistic communication conditions.
Authors: Jinhao Yang, Xinle Xie, Yuhan Wu, Xiangli Jiang
Institution: Harbin Engineering University
Language: English
Subfield: Control and Systems Engineering
Field: Engineering
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W7201835537