Cooperative control design for a fleet of AUVs under communication constraints
Lara Briñón Arranz · 2011
This dissertation focuses on cooperative control of multi-agent systems. This topic has been extensively studied in recent literature due to its large number of applications. This thesis is concerned by the design of collaborative control strategies in order to achieve an underwater exploration mission. In particular, the final aim is to steer a fleet of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles, which are equipped by appropriate sensors, to the location of a source of temperature, pollutant or fresh water. In this situation it is relevant to consider constraints in the communication between vehicles which are described by means of a communication graph. The first contributions deal with the development of cooperative formation control laws which stabilize the fleet to time-varying formations and, in addition, which also distribute the vehicles uniformly along the formation. Finally, the source-seeking problem is tackled by interpreting the fleet of vehicles as a mobile sensor network. In particular, it is shown that the measurements collected by the fleet of vehicles allows us to estimate the gradient of a scalar field. Following this idea, a distributed algorithm based on consensus algorithms is proposed to estimate the gradient direction of a signal distribution.