Leader-follower formation control of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles with limited communications

This paper considers the problem of leader-follower formation control for a team of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) under the constraint of limited communications. First, a new leader follower control strategy is proposed for multiple AUVs in order for the follower vehicles to keep the desired relative distances and angles with respect to the leader. Then, the stability of the overall closed-loop system is shown using Lyapunov stability analysis. Next, a nonlinear filtering approach is used in order to estimate velocity signals communicated among the vehicles with multiple packet dropouts. Simulation results are presented to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.