Prospective research on coordinated control of multiple AUVS

This paper proposes some feasible ideas to improve research on coordinated control of multiple AUVS in the future. Firstly, there is a glancing overview about the state of the art of coordinated multi-AUVS, especially the drawbacks in concurrent research have been indicated, and then the aim of prospective research to derive distributed and scalable control laws is announced, which is based on stability criteria in global for multi-AUV systems. Secondly, there are four countermeasures addressed as prospective technology and possible improvements. The first issue is development of novel distributed algorithms in global but not in local case, secondly it is necessary to analyze the stabilization both on switching communication topology and switching formation topology. Thirdly, robust control is useful to deal with the unreliable acoustic communication system. Furthermore, complex vehicle dynamics should be highly regarded for coordinated control for heterogenous AUVS. At last, it is supposed that the gap between the scientific theory and commercial end users, could be bridged by dedicating appropriate efforts and prospective improvements mentioned above.