Average consensus time-varying formation control of underactuated autonomous underwater vehicles based on event triggering decoupling mechanism

This paper focuses on the challenge of time-varying formation control for underactuated autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). To tackle this challenge, an average consensus time-varying formation control based on event triggering decoupling mechanism (ETDM-ACTVF) is proposed. Firstly, the average consensus time-varying formation (ACTVF) based on the affine transformation are introduced, and the control objective considering the dynamic characteristics of underactuated AUVs is proposed. The trajectory tracking controller is designed by the back stepping method. Secondly, an event triggering decoupling mechanism (ETDM) achieves the state decoupling to constrain the uncontrollable state. Moreover, a dynamic event triggering mechanism is employed to reduce the execution frequency of actuators. Finally, the excellent performance of the proposed algorithm in addressing both the underactuated AUV time-varying formation control and decoupling control problems is demonstrated through simulation results.