Robust adaptive formation control of underactuated autonomous underwater vehicles under input saturation

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the leader-follower formation control of underactuated Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) in the presence of unknown bounded time-varying disturbances and input saturation, where the non-diagonal mass and damping matrices are considered in the realistic dynamical model of AUV. Additional control is employed to handle the input saturation and underactuation of AUV. Based on the additional control, the leader-follower formation control law is designed by incorporating adaptive technique with dynamic surface control(DSC) method. The adaptive laws are designed to estimate the bounds of unknown time-variant environmental disturbances. The stability analysis indicates that the proposed formation control law can make AUVs achieve the desired formation and guarantees uniformly ultimate boundedness of all signals of the AUVs formation closed-loop system. Simulation results on three AUVs demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed formation control law.