Recovery control of autonomous underwater vehicles based on modified delay-product-type functional

This paper focuses on the recovery process of autonomous underwater vehicles, emphasizing a hierarchical framework in which autonomous underwater vehicles are categorized into a mothership and sub-vessels. In the recovery phase, following the completion of an underwater mission, sub-vessels navigate towards a location designated by the mothership. The crux of the recovery hinges on the design of the controller for adapting communication delays induced by environmental in underwater communication transmissions. The mothership and sub-vessels constitute a collaborative multi-autonomous underwater vehicles network equipped with these controllers, making them operate through the synchronized adjustment of their states represented in error terms. A delay-dependent controller condition criterion is proposed based on the modified delay-product-type Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional. The controller with the gain obtained from the criterion manages the system effectively and ensures successful recovery. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated through a case study involving a network comprising one leading and four following autonomous underwater vehicles.