Robust Distributed Consensus of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles in 3D Space

In this paper, robust distributed consensus of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) in the presence of ocean disturbances is investigated where the considered model describes both the kinematics and dynamics of the AUV with six degrees of freedom. The backstepping technique is used to make the position and the orientation of the vehicles to reach a consensus. This is achieved in two steps. First the desired linear and angular velocities for position and orientation consensus are calculated. Then the control torques are designed to force the vehicle velocities to converge to the desired ones obtained in the first step in the presence of environmental disturbances. To illustrate the performance of the proposed consensus approaches, simulation results are provided.