Consensus Path-following Control of Multiple Underactuated Unmanned Underwater Vehicles

Abstract

This work mainly studies the problem of how to steer a group of underactuated unmanned underwater vehicles UUVs to specified paths coordinately. The algorithm proposed consists of a single path-following strategy and a path parameter consensus tracking strategy. In the context of single path following, we describe the path to be followed by an arbitrary scalar, then by using Lyapunov and backstepping theories, a single path-following strategy was derived to drive each UUV move to the predefined path asymptotically. In the coordinated level, we focus on the coordination for the scalar parameters. In particular, we show that all the path parameters can track with a virtual reference leader who is a neighbor of only a subset of following UUVs with local interactions. The stability of the closed system was proved and analyzed theoretically. The validity of the algorithm proposed is supported by simulation results.