Formation Tracking Control for Multiple Unmanned Underwater Vehicles with Time Delays

This paper deals with formation control problem for multiple unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) tracking a maneuvering target with time delays. The formation tracking control is divided into two problems, estimation of the target dynamics and consensus control of UUVs. Owing to the severe communication constraints in the ocean, it is supposed that the target information is partially available to UUVs, and the communication topology is undirected connected. To analyze the convergence of the tracking errors and estimation errors, algebraic graph, matrix theory and Lyapnov-Krasovskii functional are utilized. Finally, simulation results are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed strategy.