Consensus formation tracking control of multiple autonomous underwater vehicle systems
多自主水下航行器系统一致性编队跟踪控制

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 closedloop system is analyzed mathematically by adopting Nested Matrosov theorem. Simulation results are presented and discussed for validating the proposed controller.