Realistic cooperative control mechanism of multiple AUVs

Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) has turned to be an effective mean for scientific, industrial and naval applications. The focus of research of AUV is gradually moving towards multiple autonomous underwater vehicles (MAUV) in recent years. This paper describes an investigation into cooperative control of MAUV. Firstly, a distributed control architecture (MOOS) was applied to MAUV system. According to MOOS, functionalities of AUV were organized in a modular manner and a unified information exchange mechanism was used to ensure an efficient communication between different modules. Secondly, a behavior based control strategy was proposed to enable the AUV to cooperate with each other intelligently and adaptively. Interval programming algorithm was applied to make sure that behaviors of each AUV can be coordinated in a timely and optimal manner. Stability of behavior-based control of AUV was analyzed. Finally, a distributed simulation environment was established and a series of simulation were carried out to verify the feasibility of methods mentioned above.