Fixed-time Leader-Following Formation Control of AUVs Without Velocity Measurements

Abstract

This paper is concerned with formation control of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), focusing on improving system convergence speed and overcoming velocity measurement limitation. By employing the fixed-time control theory and command filtering technique, a full state feedback formation algorithm is proposed, which makes the follower AUV track the leader in a given time with all signals in the system globally practically stabilized in fixed time. To avoid degraded control performance due to inaccurate velocity measurement, a fixed-time convergent observer is designed to estimate the velocity of AUVs. We then give an observer-based fixed-time control method, with which acceptable formation tracking performance can be achieved in fixed time without velocity measurement. The effectiveness and performance of the proposed method is demonstrated by numerical simulations.