Robust Formation Control for Multiple Underwater Vehicles.

This paper addresses the distance-based formation control problem for multiple Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) in a leader-follower architecture. The leading AUV is assigned a task to track a desired trajectory and the following AUVs try to set up a predefined formation structure by attaining specific distances among their neighboring AUVs, while avoiding collisions and enabling at the same time relative localization. More specifically, a decentralized control protocol of minimal complexity is proposed that achieves prescribed, arbitrarily fast and accurate formation establishment.