Distributed circumnavigation control of autonomous underwater vehicles based on local information

This paper investigates the distributed circumnavigation problem by an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) team to enclose a target. When the AUVs do not have a global coordinate system or a common reference direction, moreover when some vehicles cannot detect the target, this circumnavigation problem becomes challenging. The above situation is common in underwater environments and is taken into account in this paper. Considering the kinematic and dynamic models of vehicles, this paper proposes a cascade-based distributed control law. The proposed control law via local relative position measurement can realize a desired circumnavigation formation around the target. Furthermore, we show that with a radius determinant mechanism, this control law enables the vehicles which do not detect the target to keep a specified pattern without exchanging the target position information. Finally, simulations are provided to illustrate the result.