The aim of this article is to develop a new cooperative path following control scheme for a team of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) which track one curve with nonlinear uncertainties. Individual path-following controllers are designed to guarantee that each AUV meets the desired tracking performance. For the cooperative path following, a containment control approach is incorporated into the design, where each AUV is forced to evenly disperse on a path that is parameterized by a continuous variable over a communication network. The main features of the paper that unlike the existing designs are that: first, by employing the command filtered control technique, the assumption of second-order derivative of the reference path is removed. Second, a globally uniformly ultimately bounded (GUUB) path following control structure is proposed that enables two kinds of controllers to switch under different cases. Third, coordination between multiple AUVs is achieved through a containment design, and a path variable containment cooperative path following controller is derived that enables multiple AUVs to be evenly dispersed and guided by the virtual leaders. Finally, the stability analysis and simulation example are given to verify the proposed control strategy.

A new type of containment maneuvering protocols for multiple marine surface vehicles (MSVs) is developed to follow a parameterized path in this work, where the tracking errors are constrained within finite time and the information needed to be transmitted is quantized during coordination. To achieve containment maneuvering of multiple MSVs, a two-objective coordinated control framework is proposed. For the geometric objective, by developing tan-type barrier Lyapunov functions (BLFs) and extended Lyapunov condition-based finite-time guidance laws, the performance of the parameterized line-of-sight guidance framework, including convergence speed and tracking error constraints, is improved. For the dynamic objective, based on quantized control strategy and smooth saturation functions, novel bounded containment maneuvering protocols are proposed to dramatically alleviate the burden of communications among MSVs and ensure more faster dynamic behavior on tracking the path updating speed. Both theoretical analysis and experimental tests with comparative studies illustrate the validity of the proposed containment maneuvering strategy.

The aim of this article is to derive a containment maneuvering coordination strategy for a team of marine surface vehicles (MSVs) to track one parameterized path guided by two virtual leaders, where the tracking errors are constrained and the communications among MSVs are quantized. A two-level coordinated framework for containment maneuvering is proposed. For the kinematic level, to obtain the performance of tracking error constraints, guidance laws are derived by developing parameterized line-of-sight-based symmetrical $\text{{ln}}$ -type Lyapunov functions, where the control functions are injected into the guidance laws to prevent constraint violations. For the coordination level, a communication protocol is proposed to reduce the amount of communication data by developing a quantized control strategy. Compared with the current containment maneuvering strategy, the whole design can bind the along-track and cross-track errors into the user-defined regions, increase the convergence speed of tracking errors, save bandwidth of the whole network, and reduce the sensitivity of the initial positions of MSVs. Theoretical analysis shows that all signals are bounded. Experimental examples are also provided to verify the proposed containment maneuvering strategy.

This work proposes a command filter-based adaptive practical prescribed-time (PPT) asymptotic tracking control scheme for autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) under dynamic uncertainties. Considering that the followers have limited communication angles in the leader–follower formation structure, where a novel controller is proposed to ensure communication angles to achieve preassignable precision within a predefined time. First, we present a PPT control for handling the limited communication angles and, thus, they are allowed to be limited, turnable, and controllable. Then, to achieve the asymptotic convergence of output tracking errors, the proposed adaptive controllers can effectively insure the trajectory tracking errors of AUVs asymptotically converge to zero under the influence of dynamic uncertainties. Furthermore, the derived asymptotically tracking command filter technique for AUVs not only deduce an acceleration-free strategy for followers but also achieve the asymptotic convergence of output tracking errors for the command filters themselves. In the end, the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy is demonstrated through stability analysis and simulation test.

The cooperative path following problem of multiple underactuated autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) involves two tasks. The first one is to force each AUV to converge to the desired parameterized path. The second one is to satisfy the requirement of a cooperative behavior along the paths. In this paper, both of the tasks have been further studied. For the first one, a simplified path following controller is proposed by incorporating the dynamic surface control (DSC) technique to avoid the calculation of derivatives of virtual control signals. Besides, in order to handle the uncertain dynamics, a new type of neural network (NN) adaptive controller is derived, and then an NN based energy‐efficient path following controller is firstly proposed, which consists of an adaptive neural controller dominating in the neural active region and an extra robust controller working outside the neural active region. For the second one, in order to reduce the amount of communications between multiple AUVs, a distributed estimator for the reference common speed is firstly proposed as determined by the communications topology adopted, which means the global knowledge of the reference speed is relaxed for the problem of cooperative path following. The overall algorithm ensures that all the signals in the closed‐loop system are globally uniformly ultimately bounded (GUUB) and the output of the system converges to a small neighborhood of the reference trajectory by properly choosing the design parameters. Simulation results validate the performance and robustness of the proposed strategy.

In this paper, a control system structure with output constrained and quantized communication is proposed for a group of marine surface vessels (MSVs) in the framework of containment maneuvering. First, the tracking error of the system is constrained to a particular range at every moment in the whole process of the system, based on an asymmetric $ln$ -type Lyapunov function instead of a symmetric $ln$ -type Lyapunov function. Secondly, a quantized communication protocol is proposed to enable the reduction of the amount of communication data and a speed estimator is proposed to enable the execution of more complex and diverse tasks at the cooperative level. Thirdly, for unknown dynamics, a data-driven adaptive disturbance observer (DADO) is employed for estimatiom. Compared with existing containment maneuvering strategies, the control method in this paper has more flexible parameter design processes, a larger initial range available and lower bandwidth requirement, and no prior knowledge of dynamics is required. Finally, the effectiveness of the control strategy in this paper is verified by simulation.