Cooperative model predictive control for ship formation tracking with communication delays

Communication delays are crucial in ship formation control. This paper proposed a cooperative control scheme for ship formation tracking with communication delays based on Model Predictive Control. An MPC controller is designed for trajectory tracking for each ship. Secondly, a predictive observer is designed using the predictive state of the leader ship in each decision horizon. With the predictive observer, the followers can online estimate the current motion states of the leader depending on the received delayed motion information of the leader. The reference trajectories of the followers are determined based on the estimated states, and the control strategies are decided consequently. In the end, comparative simulations are carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed controller.