Leader-Following Multiple Unmanned Underwater Vehicles Consensus Control under the Fixed and Switching Topologies with Unmeasurable Disturbances

We propose a consensus control strategy for multiple unmanned underwater vehicles (multi-UUVs) with unmeasurable disturbances under the fixed and switching topologies. The current methods presented in the literature mainly solve tracking consensus problems with the disturbances under the time-invariant and time-varying topologies, respectively. In the paper, considering the complex nonlinear and couple model of the UUV, the technique of the feedback linearization is employed to transform the nonlinear UUV model into a second-order integral UUV model. For unmeasurable disturbances consisting of unknown model uncertainties and external disturbance for each UUV, we design the distributed extended state observer (DESO) to estimate the disturbances using the UUV position information relative to its neighbours. Moreover, leader-following multi-UUVs consensus control algorithm that enables all following UUVs to track the leader UUV state information based on the estimation state information from the DESO is proposed for two types of topologies, the fixed and switching topologies. Finally, simulation results are shown to demonstrate the effectiveness of the algorithm proposed in the paper.