Receding horizon formation control of nonholonomic autonomous underwater vehicles

The cooperative control of marine vehicles finds many applications in a variety of marine missions and tasks. This paper investigates the receding horizon formation control problem of a feet of nonholonomic autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), in which the follower AUVs are required to keep a prescribed formation pattern with respect to the leader one. A novel optimization problem and a new receding horizon control (RHC) algorithm are proposed. Results on the feasibility of the receding horizon formation algorithm and on the stability of the closed-loop systems are provided. Simulation studies for the formation-keeping control of the nonholonomic AUVs are carried out, and the simulation results verifies the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.