Distributed Path Tracking for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles Based on Pseudo Position Feedback

Abstract

In this paper, we consider the distributed polynomial path tracking problem for a swarm of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) modeled by second-order uncertain multi-agent systems. The application scenario of this paper has three distinguished characteristics. First, the communication network for the multi-agent system is unreliable and switching. Under the jointly connected condition, the communication network can be disconnected the entire time. Second, it is supposed that only the relative position between AUVs can be obtained for trajectory tracking control. Third, the AUV dynamics are subject to uncertain system parameters. By applying the cooperative output regulation control framework, a novel distributed robust control scheme is proposed to solve the distributed path tracking problem, which consists of three parts. First, to cope with communication network uncertainty, the distributed observer was invoked to recover the polynomial path for each AUV. Second, based on the relative position measurement between AUVs, a pseudo position estimator was adopted to generate the pseudo position for each AUV. Finally, based on the estimated polynomial path and the pseudo position, a certainty equivalent robust internal model control law was synthesized to achieve asymptotic reference trajectory tracking, where the internal model compensator aims to tackle uncertain system parameters. Numerical simulations are provided to validate the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme.