Coordinated Target Tracking Strategy for Multiple Unmanned Underwater Vehicles With Time Delays

Abstract

Focusing on coordination and consensus, this paper, addresses a control problem for a group of unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) by tracking a maneuvering target with varying velocity and time delays. To realize coordinated target tracking, consensus control of multiple UUVs requires neighboring UUV state information, detected target state information, and estimated target acceleration information. At least one UUV is assumed to be capable of obtaining information about the target, and the communication topology graph of the vehicle is assumed to be undirected connected. We consider the convergence analysis of this multi-UUV system for two conditions: information interaction between the target and an UUV with time delays and information interaction between the target and an UUV without time delays. Sufficient conditions for the uniform ultimate boundedness of the tracking errors and estimation errors are obtained by utilizing a Lyapnov-Krasovskii functional. Two simulations are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Keywords

• Multiple unmanned underwater vehicles
• target tracking
• consensus control
• time delay