Affine Formation Maneuver Control for NUMVs Under Unreliable Networks: A Reliability-Enhanced Interaction Strategy

Reliable communication networks are essential for formation maneuver control (FMC) of networked unmanned marine vehicles (NUMVs). However, communication reliability may be degraded by congestion, channel contention, and random packet losses. Within this context, this paper develops an affine FMC scheme with a reliability-enhanced interaction mechanism (RIM) for NUMVs. An auxiliary system is first constructed to decompose the framework into a localization layer and a tracking layer. With this decomposition, unreliable communications are handled only in the localization layer without involving the nonlinear NUMV model. Then, an RIM is developed to cope with unreliable networks. By assigning a minimum communication interval and staggered transmission instants, communication congestion induced by frequent interactions and channel contention caused by simultaneous transmissions can be effectively alleviated. Finally, rigorous analysis and simulations validate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed strategy.