Limited Communication Consensus Control of Leader-Following Multi-UUVs in a Swarm System Under Multi-Independent Switching Topologies and Time Delay

The limited communication consensus control problem is studied for leader-following multi-UUVs (multiple unmanned underwater vehicles) in a swarm system that contains multiple secondorder UUVs with the time-varying delay. The multi-UUV swarm will be divided into many sub-groups that each includes one leader and many follower UUVs, and a leaders-group will be composed of all leaders of the sub-groups. In the leaders-group, one leader is called the commander, and the swarm will follow the commander. Under the swarm system mechanism, multi-independent switching topologies are proposed for the swarm hybrid structure under limited communication. Two suitable Lyapunov-Krasovskii functionals will be given to obtaining sufficient consensus conditions and multiple randomly varying leader-follower consensus stability criteria for the Markovian switching swarm system. Then, it will be proved that the swarm system is stochastically stable. Furthermore, a state feedback controller is designed such that the resulting closed-loop system is stochastically stable. Finally, numerical examples are shown to demonstrate the effectiveness of the discussed methods.