Event-triggered leader-follower communication based formation control with dual-predictor for multiple AUVs

Abstract

Formation control of multiple Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) plays an important role in underwater missions. Common formation control is based on frequent data communication between multiple AUVs, therefore, how to adjust data communication frequency effectively between leader AUV and follower AUVs in the formation control process is of great significance for improving efficiency. A double-predictive method using least squares prediction is running on both leader AUV and follower AUVs for state estimation, and an event-triggered leader-follower communication mechanism to adjust underwater communication frequency is applied into formation control model, which considers the information synchronization between leader AUV and follower AUVs, so as to save limited communication resources inter-AUVs. The stability analysis of backstepping based formation control law is proven by Lyapunov function. Simulation results and lake test verify that the proposed event-triggered leader-follower communication based formation control strategy significantly reduces the number of unnecessary communications between multiple AUVs compared with the use of time-triggered methods, thus effectively saving the limited communication resources of AUVs.