Consensus formation tracking control of multiple autonomous underwater vehicle systems

This paper investigates the problem of steering a group of autonomous underwater vehicles along specified paths while keeping a desired spatial formation. Based on passivity and consensus tracking theories, a distributed control strategy was derived, by which the consensus formation tracking problems for a group of autonomous underwater vehicles can be accomplished, when the common reference velocity signal is available to only a subset of the cooperating vehicles. The proposed control strategy can be divided into two parts. Firstly, a passivity channel from coordinated error to tracking error is established based on the passivity theory. Secondly, a coordinated consensus tracking strategy is derived to ensure each AUV for reaching a consistent state about the inconsistent reference information. The stability of the overall closed-loop system is analyzed mathematically by adopting Nested Matrosov theorem. Simulation results are presented and discussed for validating the proposed controller.