Singularity-free Formation Path Following of Underactuated AUVs: Extended Version

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel formation path following control method for underactuated autonomous underwater vehicles that ensures collision avoidance, operational limit adherence, and singularity-free attitude control, with proven stability and validated through simulations.

Contribution

It presents a hierarchical control algorithm combining collision avoidance and operational constraints within a null space framework for underactuated AUVs, ensuring singularity-free attitude control.

Findings

The control scheme guarantees collision avoidance and operational limit adherence.

The closed-loop system is proven to be uniformly semiglobally exponentially stable.

Numerical simulations validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Abstract

This paper proposes a method for formation path following control of a fleet of underactuated autonomous underwater vehicles. The proposed method combines several hierarchic tasks in a null space-based behavioral algorithm to safely guide the vehicles. Compared to the existing literature, the algorithm includes both inter-vehicle and obstacle collision avoidance, and employs a scheme that keeps the vehicles within given operation limits. The algorithm is applied to a six degree-of-freedom model, using rotation matrices to describe the attitude to avoid singularities. Using the results of cascaded systems theory, we prove that the closed-loop system is uniformly semiglobally exponentially stable. We use numerical simulations to validate the results.