Formation constraint tracking control of AUV

The formation constraint tracking control of Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) was studied in this paper. The system total error was divided into two parts; one is the tracking error of each AUV and the other is the formation error. On the basis of this division of the system total error, an adaptive sliding mode variable structure control law, which is eq. (17) in the full paper, was proposed to take into due consideration the parameter uncertainties and the ocean current distribution of each AUV. The convergence of the proposed control law was proved in Theorem 1 in the full paper, whose proof involved eqs. (19) through (22), and the appropriate path variable updating law, which was eq. (24) in the full paper, was selected to avoid using high gain control for large error signal in the proposed algorithm. Simulation results, given in Figs. 2 through 6 in the full paper, show preliminarily that AUVs can cruise in formation regardless of the ocean current distribution, that the model parameters can converge in finite time, and that the formation error with formation constraint was smaller than that without formation constraint.