Anti-disturbance cooperative formation containment control for multiple autonomous underwater vehicles with actuator saturation

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the issue of time-varying formation containment control for multiple autonomous underwater vehicles (MAUVs) system subject to actuator saturation in three-dimensional space. The adaptive saturation dynamic filter technology is incorporated to reduce the influence of actuator saturation on the MAUVs system. For the sake of actively compensating the total disturbance containing the unknown nonlinearities and external disturbances, the extended state observers (ESOs) are customized, thus improving the anti-disturbance capability of MAUVs system. The tracking differentiators (TDs) are employed into estimating the derivatives of the proposed virtual control laws and dealing with the matter of explosion of complexity. Furthermore, via Lyapunov stability analysis, it is proven that the designed control laws can effectively guarantee that the leader AUVs are capable of tracking the virtual leader AUV with time-varying offset vectors, and at the same time the follower AUVs are capable of being steered into the convex hull formed by the leader AUVs. At last, a numerical simulation is implemented to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.