Autonomous coordination of surface ships

This paper presents two coordination schemes for synchronizing the motion of surface ships during formation operations using a limited set of measurements. The coordination schemes follow a leader-follower structure, and only the measured position and heading of the leader ship must be known to synchronize the motion of the two ships. The coordination approaches do not require knowledge of any predefined trajectories or paths, and are inherently robust towards environmental disturbances. Furthermore, no information of the parameters of the mathematical model, velocity, acceleration or control input of the leader ship is required to achieve synchronization between the ships, and only the follower ship is responsible for the control action required for synchronization. The leader ship may manoeuvre freely without considering the motion of the follower ship, and the follower may thus synchronize to an unknown ship based only on position and heading information, e.g. from AIS.