Formation of Multiple Underactuated Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Based on Position and Approximation Control

Underactuated autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) is one of significant interest research areas for most of the researcher in recent years. These vehicles are currently used for scientific and military underwater application like in exploration in the sea, monitoring, etc. Systematic dynamic and kinematic modeling and it's control are the most active part of research in marine engineering. This paper mainly concerned with the modeling of the AUV in both dynamic and kinematic which used integration action to stabilize in the horizontal plane. The mathematical model is extracted from Lagrangian formulation and transformed into kinematic model. The main goal of this research is to enhance its performance in term of robustness and to make the system uniformly bounded stable in the presence of disturbances. Furthermore, this work is extended to formation control of AUVs in the leader follower scenario. For converging the trajectory as the reference for the follower a virtual vehicle is constructed. The design of the controller depends on the position based estimation along with back-stepping technique, which enable the follower to move along the path defined by the leader. Lyapunov analysis is being carried out as the proof of controller perfromance. Simulation result is provided to show the efficacy of the control algorithm in the presence of unknown disturbance and parametric variations.