A DMPC-Based Approach to Circular Cooperative Path-following Control of Unmanned Underwater Vehicles

As a class of important industrial Cyber-Physical systems, multiple unmanned underwater vehicle systems (UUVs) connected via acoustic communication find widely applications in many maritime missions and underwater operations. This paper studies the circular cooperative path-following control problem of a group of UUVs subject to system constraints, where the distributed model predictive control (DMPC) approach is proposed to achieve optimal circular formation. Based on the idea from virtual vehicles, the error dynamic of each UUV with respect to its desired virtual vehicle is first obtained. Then the cost function is designed by penalizing the path-following error and the angle inconsistency in a circle between two UUVs within a communication range. With this cost function, a DMPC problem is formulated to provide distributed path-following control law for each UUV. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed approach is verified by a simulation study.