Formation Tracking Control for a Team of Networked Underwater Robot Systems with Uncertain Hydrodynamics

This paper studies time-varying formation tracking control for a group of AUVs (autonomous underwater vehicles). Due to the inherent nonlinearities, uncertain hydrodynamics, and unpredictable external disturbances, coordination of AUVs is challenging. Conventional linear controllers may not satisfy performance requirements, especially when changes in system and environment occur during underwater operations. We investigate robust formation tracking under a static communication network, where the states of AUVs form a predefined time-varying formation, while tracking a desired time-varying reference trajectory. A distributed controller using continuous control is proposed to solve this problem. A numerical example is provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.