Virtual Target based Path-Following Guidance System for Cooperative USV Swarms

This paper focuses on the integration of a cooperative swarm methodology initially developed for small ground mobile robots, with a virtual target based path-following guidance system developed for marine surface vehicle systems. After separately describing the approaches, for swarm aggregation and path-following guidance respectively, the paper reports the effortless procedure to perform the integration of the proposed techniques. Simulative and experimental results are then proposed to prove the effectiveness of the proposed methodology.