Fixed-Time Leader-Following Formation Control of Fully-Actuated Underwater Vehicles Without Velocity Measurements

This paper is concerned with formation control of fully-actuated underwater vehicles (FUVs), 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 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 FUVs. Then the authors give an observer-based fixed-time control method, with which acceptable formation performance can be achieved in fixed time without velocity measurement. The effectiveness and performance of the proposed method are demonstrated by numerical simulations.

Automated summary

This paper proposes a formation control method for fully-actuated underwater vehicles (FUVs), which achieves global practical stability and fixed-time formation performance using fixed-time control and command filtering techniques. An observer is utilized to estimate the velocity of FUVs and overcome the limitation of inaccurate velocity measurement.