Formation Tracking for Autonomous Surface Vessels Based on an Improved Reaching Law

This paper focuses on the formation tracking problem for autonomous surface vessels. In current works, there are challenges regarding the convergence time and chattering in autonomous surface vessels formation control. Considering these questions, a controller based an improved reaching law is designed. The proposed improved reaching law is introduced that not only accelerates convergence speed but also reduces chattering. Furthermore, by using Lyapunov theory, the formation tracking errors can be guaranteed to be semi-global uniformly ultimately bounded. Finally, simulation results illustrate that the proposed control method has faster convergence speed and better performance than traditional methods.