Decentralized formation cooperative control for homing of a swarm of underactuated AUVs via singular perturbation

This paper addresses a decentralized control mechanism for the homing process of underactuated AUVs. The mechanism can be decoupled into foraging and tracking. During the homing process, the mother submarine is regarded as a Gaussian type of nutrient profile and underactuated AUVs are regarded as agents in swarm. The problem of homing is transformed into the social foraging. In the swarm, each individual has a double-integrator dynamic. Under the proposed artificial potential field, the motion of each individual is determined by repulsion or attraction from other individuals, attraction from nutrient profile and repulsion from toxicant profile. Therefore, each agent generates a collision-free trajectory tend to the nutrient profile. The trajectories can be used as reference trajectories for the underactuated AUVs. For the trajectory tracking, the speed of attitude dynamics is much faster than that of position dynamics. Such characteristic can be naturally treated by time scale decomposition method and singular perturbation theory which allows independent analysis of the dynamics in each time scale. In addition, the stability of the collective behavior of the swarm and the trajectory tracking controller are proposed by Lyapunov theorem. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed control mechanism is demonstrated via a set of simulation results.

Automated summary

This paper presents a decentralized control mechanism for the homing process of underactuated AUVs. The mechanism transforms the homing problem into social foraging, and utilizes artificial potential field and time scale decomposition methods to generate collision-free trajectories and achieve trajectory tracking. The stability of the collective behavior of the swarm and the trajectory tracking controller are proven through Lyapunov theorem.