Privacy-Preserving Formation Control for Networked Underactuated USVs: A Passivity-Based Approach

TL;DR

This paper presents a passivity-based control method for multiple USVs that ensures formation tracking while preserving individual privacy by sharing only estimated fleet centroid data.

Contribution

It introduces a novel privacy-preserving formation control approach using port-Hamiltonian models and passivity-based controllers for networked USVs.

Findings

Effective formation tracking demonstrated on real USV platform.

Privacy is preserved by sharing only estimated fleet centroid.

The control method guarantees system stability.

Abstract

This paper studies coordinated trajectory planning and tracking control for multiple unmanned surface vessels (USVs) under strict privacy requirements. To avoid the privacy risks associated with direct position sharing in conventional cooperative methods, the proposed approach adopts an estimated fleet centroid as the only shared variable, preventing individual trajectory disclosure while enabling coordination. Based on this interaction mechanism, a formation-oriented trajectory is generated for the fleet. The collective dynamics are modeled using Port-Hamiltonian systems, and a passivity-based tracking controller is designed for each USV to accurately follow the planned trajectories. The stability of the closed-loop system is rigorously proven, and experiments on a real USV platform confirm effective formation tracking and privacy preservation. The proposed result extends and validates through experimental results the approach in [26] that was limited to idealized pointmass models and lacked a feedback control.