Optimal Rigid Graph-Based Cooperative Formation Control of AUVs in Anchor-Free Environments
Jing Yan, Haoyu Wang, Xian Yang, Xiaoyuan Luo, Xinping Guan
Abstract
Formation control of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) has been regarded as the basis of many sophisticated marine missions. At present, there have been a lot of formation controllers for AUVs, however they rely on the straight-line propagation and the additional anchor-localization infrastructures. This paper is concerned with an optimal rigid graph-based cooperative formation issue of AUVs in anchor-free environments. We first employ the ray tracing model to compensate the range bias caused by straight-line propagation. Based on this, a consensus-based localization strategy is designed to estimate the positions of AUVs by merely utilizing the network connectivity of AUVs. With the estimated position information, an optimal rigid graph is constructed to reduce the communication energy consumption. Along with this, a model-free formation controller is developed to adjust the relative positions of AUVs while steering the group to arrive at the destination. Note that the advantages of our solution are highlighted as follows: (1) the self-localization strategy in this paper can relax the dependence of anchor nodes and improve the localization accuracy; (2) the optimal rigid graph-based formation controller can reduce the energy consumption as compared with the neighbor rule-based controllers. Finally, simulation and experimental results are both presented to validate the effectiveness of our solution.