Distributed adaptive sliding mode control for attitudes synchronization of multiple autonomous underwater vehicles

This article is concerned with attitudes synchronization of networked autonomous underwater vehicles, which aims to enable all the autonomous underwater vehicles tracking the desired attitude coordinately, when the desired attitude information can only be achieved by one or one subset autonomous underwater vehicles. A Lyapunov technique is presented for designing an adaptive synchronization control protocol using sliding mode and consensus theory. The uncertainty of the autonomous underwater vehicle dynamics, and the unknown external disturbance and input saturation were both considered in our controller proposed; moreover, only the neighbors’ information were used by the controller, so it is totally distributed. Simulations were performed to validate the theoretical results.