Stable Schooling for Multiple Underactuated AUVs

This paper presents a stable schooling scheme for multiple autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) where the number of independent actuators for each vehicle are less than the degrees of freedom (DOF). In most of the formation schemes presented so far, the multiple dynamic agents usually have been modeled as particle systems whose motions can be expressed as simple double-integrator. Therefore, these formation algorithms could not directly apply to the most of actual systems, typically to the case of underwater vehicle systems whose dynamics are highly nonlinear. Moreover, the AUVs considered in this paper are underactuated that each vehicle’s 6 DOF motion is steered only by one thruster, one rudder, and one stern plane. For this kind of multiple underwater vehicles, proposed schooling scheme can guarantee the stability of the formation and further guarantee the velocity and heading matching of the group while keeping obstacle avoidances. Numerical simulations are carried out to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed schooling scheme.