Distributed observer for a team of autonomous underwater vehicles utilizing a beacon unit on the surface

Abstract

In this paper, a distributed observer is designed for estimating the system states of autonomous underwater vehicles using the measured states at a beacon surface vehicle. Here, the past data of control signals is not included in the observer policy. Thus the coupling between observer and controller policies are removed completely. Only the inter-agent relative differences between the agents alongside with the relative difference of the beacon's states with one of the agents in the network are required for reaching convergence in both observer and controller consensus errors. A simulation study for a network of four singleintegrator dynamic agents is provided for performance evaluation of the proposed algorithm.