Obstacle Avoidance and Communication Distance Maintenance During Cooperative Target Encircling Control of USVs Based on Control Barrier Functions

In this paper, a distributed guidance law based on control barrier functions is proposed for the cooperative encircling control of multiple unmanned surface vehicles (multi-USVs) under obstacle avoidance and communication distance maintenance. Firstly, a cooperative encircling guidance law that only requires neighboring vehicle information is designed to achieve encircling the moving target. Secondly, the control barrier functions (CBFs) are introduced to establish the quadratic optimization problem with obstacle avoidance constraint and communication distance constraint. Optimizing the guidance law can ensure that neighboring USVs always remain in communication range while avoiding static obstacles. Finally, the comparison simulations with respect to traditional method are carried out. The results shows that the proposed control method can effectively improve the performance of executing encircling tasks in obstacle environment and smooth the control output so as to enhance its practicality.