Static consensus analysis of multi-AUV systems with impulsive protocol and time delays

To achieve static consensus of multiple autonomous underwater vehicle (multi-AUV) systems under the constraints of limited underwater acoustic communication bandwidth and the presence of time delays, a distributed impulsive control protocol is proposed. Firstly, to address the complexity introduced by the strongly coupled nonlinear mathematical model of AUVs, a linearization transformation of the AUV model is performed using differential geometry theory. Secondly, a distributed control protocol based on an impulsive communication strategy is proposed, where AUVs only need to exchange information at discrete intervals. A classification study is then conducted on various levels of communication delay, leading to the derivation of necessary and sufficient conditions for achieving static consensus in the multi-AUV systems using graph and matrix theory. Finally, several numerical simulations are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed control protocol.