Containment Control of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles With Stochastic Environment Disturbances

This article is concerned with a containment control issue for autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), subject to unavailable velocity signals in cyber side and stochastic environment disturbances in physical side. We first divide the environmental disturbances into deterministic and stochastic parts. Based on this, a terminal sliding mode observer is developed to estimate the velocities of AUVs in finite time. With the estimated velocities, a distributed containment controller is designed for each AUV to follow a convex hull spanned by trajectories of the leader AUVs. For the developed velocity observer, a double power reaching law is employed to reduce the chattering and improve the convergence rate. Besides that, an adaptive strategy is incorporated into the containment controller, such that the steady-state errors caused by stochastic environment disturbances can be compensated. Stability conditions for the velocity observer and containment controller are also provided. Finally, we conduct the simulation and experimental studies to verify the effectiveness.