Spatial target path following and coordinated control of multiple UUVs

Abstract

The coordination control of multiple Underactuated Underwater Vehicles (UUVs) moving in three dimensional space is investigated in this paper. The coordinated path following control task is decomposed into two sub tasks, that is, path following control and coordination control. In the spatial curve path following control task, path following error dynamics is build in the Serret-Frenet coordinate frame. The virtual reference object can be chosen freely on the desired spatial path. Considering the speed of the UUV, the line-of-sight navigation is introduced to help the path following errors quickly converge to zero. In the coordination control sub task, the communication topology of multiple UUVs is described by the graph theory. The speed of each UUV is adjusted to achieve the coordination. The path following system and the coordination control system are viewed as the feedback connection system. Input-to-state stable of the coordinated path following system can be proved by small gain theorem. The simulation experiments can further demonstrate the good performance of the control method.

Keywords

• Underactuated underwater vehicle
• Coordinated control
• Path following
• Spatial target