Cooperative Formation Control for Multiple AUVs With Intermittent Underwater Acoustic Communication in IoUT

Autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) system has played an important role in complex Internet of Underwater Things (IoUT). As we know, single AUV is inefficient in collecting data in large-scale IoUT. In order to improve the timeliness of data, this article uses multiple AUVs with specific formation shape to collect sensory data. However, the intermittent and unreliable characteristics of underwater acoustic communication between AUVs seriously affects the performance of formation control. To solve this issue, this article mainly investigates formation control problem of leade–follower structured AUVs with state prediction estimation under the condition of unreliable underwater acoustic channel. First, a novel formation control law derived from backstepping sliding mode method is proposed, and then, a suitable Lyapunov functional is constructed to prove sufficient stability conditions. Second, Gaussian prediction model considering time delay and packet dropout has been designed to estimate the intermittent communication channel. Moreover, a new metric named formation uniform degree (FUD) is proposed to measure the degree of queue uniformity in a quantitative manner. Finally, extensive simulation results compared with traditional methods based on ideal channel model demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed formation control method.