Reducing the Impact of Communication Delay on Multi-AUVs Formation Control by a Predictive Compensation Method

This paper addresses the communication delay issue in the formation control of multiple autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) by utilizing a predictive compensation method. Firstly, the dynamic and kinematic models of the AUV s are established, and the formation control problem of the AUV s is transformed into a trajectory tracking problem based on the leader-follower algorithm. Subsequently, a formation controller is designed using the backstepping method. The mathematical model of the multi-AUVs formation control system with communication delay is analyzed. A predictive compensation method is proposed to solve the communication delay issue by utilizing the least squares and extended Kalman filter methods for delay compensation. Numerical simulations demonstrate that the proposed method can reduce the relative position error compared to the motion without delay compensation.