Design of a Consensus Based Flocking Control of Multiple Autonomous Underwater Vehicles Using Sliding Mode Approach
Bidyadhar Subudhi, Madan Mohan Rayguru, Vladimir Filaretov, Alexander Zuev · Annals of DAAAM for ... & proceedings of the ... International DAAAM Symposium · 2017
This paper proposes a flocking control algorithm for a team of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) deployed for group motion in a network where only local communication exists among the participating AUVs.The control scheme is proposed with two levels where the inner level utilizes agreement or consensus protocol to derive reference positions for the follower AUVs whereas the outer loop employs a sliding mode controller (SMC) to reduce the tracking error to zero.SMC being a suitable candidate for handling is chosen because of its inherent robustness to any uncertainties and disturbances, it is intended to design a SMC to address the problem of handling uncertainties in the hydrodynamic parameters of the AUV dynamics and has been used to steer each AUV in the flock to their desired states.By exploiting the consensus protocol and SMC, it can be ensured that once an AUV comes into the neighbour zone (maximum range for information exchange for a member AUV outside which no communication is possible) cannot be separated from the group.Therefore, this controller structure is suitable for flocking of multiple AUVs where communication constraints play a vital role in efficient performance of control algorithms.The effectiveness of the proposed controller scheme is demonstrated through MATLAB simulation.