Platoon formation control of autonomous underwater vehicles under LOS range and orientation angles constraints

A new controller design is presented on the basis of the dynamic surface control (DSC) method for the constrained platoon formation control of the underactuated autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) in the presence of model uncertainties with limited field-of-view (FOV) constraints. An asymmetric barrier Lyapunov function (BLF) is applied to prevent both the line-of-sight (LOS) range and orientation angles from violating limited FOV constraints. Lyapunov method is adopted to reveal that all signals of the closed-loop control system are bounded and the constrained platoon formation tracking errors are semi-globally uniformly ultimately bounded (SGUUB). An adaptive neural network technique is employed to compensate uncertain parameters and unmodeled dynamics of the vehicles. Compared with existing works in the literature, the proposed control scheme not only forces both the range and orientation angles between AUVs to their desired values in the presence of FOV constraints in the fixed-time, but also decrease the safety hazard by avoiding any possible collision between the vehicles, increase the tracking error convergence rate and improve the transient performance of the tracking controller for all AUVs. The computer simulation results demonstrate the efficiency of this newly proposed constrained platoon formation controller for the AUVs. [Display omitted] •Platoon formation can effectively increase movement capacity, decrease safety hazard and avoid from collisions.•The limited FOV constraints are considered in the platoon formation control for all AUVs.•A DSC approach is incorporated with asymmetric and time varying BLF-based control design.•Fixed-time theory limits the convergence time of the states errors without dependence on initial conditions.