| Summary: | This paper presents a novel swarm control framework for path following of multiple underactuated unmanned marine vehicles (UMVs) with uncertain dynamics and unmeasured velocities. Main contributions are as follows: (1) unlike previous master-slave formation control, a swarm system function with distributed and self-organized capability is designed; (2) a center-of-swarm (COS) guidance scheme without vehicle number constraints is proposed for swarm path following, where an improved artificial potential field (APF) using ring-shaped repulsion is further employed for collision avoidance and obstacle avoidance; (3) a nonlinear velocity observer is incorporated into the proposed swarm control framework to estimate the unmeasured velocities, thereby contributing to robust controllers based on fuzzy sliding mode against uncertain dynamics and time-varying disturbances. Simulations are carried out to illustrate the universal applicability and effectiveness of the proposed swarm control framework.
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