Autonomous Underwater Multivehicle Control with Limited Communication: Theory and Experiment

The work here addresses the task of coordinated control design and implementation for systems of free-moving autonomous underwater vehicles linked via underwater communication. By treating heading angle as oscillator phase, a Kuramoto model approach is used to construct controls that align or anti-align headings. To accommodate communication events occurring at finite times, the system dynamics are expressed in discrete time with communication events occurring at the update instances. In this framework, appropriate broadcast communication topologies can be evaluated. The methods are demonstrated here both in simulation and in experiment with the University of Washington autonomous underwater multivehicle system.