Formation Path Following Control of Underactuated AUVs -- With Proofs

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new control approach for multiple underactuated underwater vehicles to follow curved paths in formation, combining guidance and behavioral control with proven stability.

Contribution

It presents a novel formation path following method for underactuated AUVs that integrates line-of-sight guidance with null-space control, supported by stability proofs.

Findings

The proposed control method ensures stable formation path following.

Theoretical stability is confirmed through cascaded systems analysis.

Numerical simulations validate the effectiveness of the approach.

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel method for formation path following of multiple underactuated autonomous underwater vehicles. The method combines line-of-sight guidance with null-space-based behavioral control, allowing the vehicles to follow curved paths while maintaining the desired formation. We investigate the dynamics of the path-following error using cascaded systems theory, and show that the closed-loop system is uniformly semi-globally exponentially stable. We validate the theoretical results through numerical simulations.