Cooperative Control and Game-Theoretic Methods of Multiple Unmanned Surface Vehicles: Recent Advances and Challenges

In recent years, the coordination of multiple unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) has attracted increasing attention in fields of marine unmanned systems, owing to their advantages in autonomous operation and intelligent coordination, and flexible deployment. By leveraging networking communication and cooperative control strategies, multiple USVs can collaboratively execute complex maritime missions, demonstrating significant strategic value in marine resource exploration, ocean environmental monitoring, maritime security, and emergency rescue. Although substantial progress has been achieved in recent years, many challenges still remain in key technologies, including networking and communication mechanisms, swarm coordination strategies, and distributed control methods. To address these issues, this paper systematically reviews the system architecture, functional composition, and typical application scenarios of multiple USVs. In particular, the development trends, representative methods, and critical bottlenecks in key areas, including swarm communication and networking, swarm control, cooperative optimization, and game-theoretic decision-making, are comprehensively summarized. First, the research progress in communication and networking technologies for multiple USVs are reviewed from the perspectives of topology optimization and inter-vehicle communication interaction mechanisms. Subsequently, the research progress and inherent limitations of conventional USVs coordination control approaches are reviewed from the perspectives of path coordination, formation, dynamic interception, target fencing missions and vehicles’ motion control. Furthermore, in response to the growing demand in complex maritime environments, emerging research paradigms grounded in optimization theory and non-cooperative game frameworks are summarized, highlighting their potential in reconciling individual objectives with collective performance. Finally, the current research landscape is synthesized, and future development trends together with key technical challenges of USV cooperative techniques are summarized.