Cooperative control and game technology of multiple unmanned surface vehicles: recent advances and challenges

In recent years, the coordination of unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) has attracted increasing attention in fields of marine unmanned systems, owing to their capabilities in autonomous operation and intelligent coordination. By leveraging remote networking communication and cooperative control strategies, multiple USVs can be orchestrated to accomplish complex maritime missions in a collaborative and efficient manner, thereby exhibiting significant strategic potential in marine resource exploration, ocean environmental monitoring, and maritime security. Despite substantial advances achieved in recent years, critical challenges persist in communication mechanisms, swarm coordination strategies, and control methodologies.To address these issues, this paper presents a comprehensive review of the overall system architecture of USV clusters. Typical application scenarios are examined, and the developmental trajectory and fundamental technical bottlenecks in key areas, including swarm communication and networking, cooperative control, collaborative optimization, and game-theoretic approaches. First, the state-of-the-art in networking and communication technologies for USV swarms is reviewed, where the roles of networking efficiency and communication resource scheduling under multiple constraints are discussed in the context of their impact on cooperative control performance. 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 for autonomous decision-making 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 coordination systems are outlined.