Decoupled Cooperative Encirclement Control for Unmanned Surface Vehicles Using Asymmetric Radial Weighting

Cooperative hunting missions involving Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs) present a fundamental conflict between maintaining swarm stability and enabling tactically differentiated motion during high-speed maneuvers. To address this, this paper proposes a cooperative control law based on task decoupling and asymmetric radial weighting. The control strategy orthogonally decomposes the global objective into three independent subtasks: collective translation, tangential distribution, and radial shaping. This decomposition effectively eliminates kinematic coupling and enhances system robustness. Specifically, radial shaping is implemented via a weighted pseudo-inverse controller governed by an asymmetric cost function; this mechanism imposes strict penalties on inner USVs while prioritizing the control allocation of outer vessels, resulting in tactically optimized motion. The global asymptotic stability of the system is rigorously guaranteed via Lyapunov analysis. Simulation results demonstrate superior performance in formation establishment, maneuver stability, and asymmetric shaping, validating the method’s potential for complex maritime interdiction operations.