The time-sampling control strategy has communication discontinuities in the control of multiple AUVs (autonomous underwater vehicles). To overcome this problem, a distributed event-triggered communication mechanism is proposed to make each AUV communicate only when its own state is updated, which reduces the frequency of communication and improves the stability. This mechanism has better adaptability for formation control between heterogeneous AUV groups. At the same time, two consistency control algorithms based on event-triggered for homogeneous and heterogeneous AUV groups are studied, respectively. The known consistency algorithms are applied to the control of heterogeneous AUV groups for comparative analysis. The simulation results demonstrate that the number of communication among AUVs under the event-triggered control strategy can be significantly reduced. Therefore, the stability of the system is improved. Compared with the traditional consensus algorithm, the algorithm proposed in this paper has advantages in the control of heterogeneous AUV groups.