Research on Velocity-Coordinated Leader-Follower Cooperative Path Following Control Method for UUV Formations

This paper proposes a leader-follower cooperative path following control mechanism for Unmanned Underwater Vehicle (UUV) formations to address the challenge of coordinated path following. By tackling the relatively independent problems of path following control and formation coordination control, the mechanism enables multiple UUVs to maintain formation while accurately following the desired path. First, a guidance law was developed for the path following control of underactuated UUVs by extending the Line-of-Sight (LOS) method, and a controller was designed using sliding mode control and backstepping techniques to allow both leaders and followers to track the desired path. Second, a velocity-coordinated formation control method was employed to achieve cooperative path following while minimizing communication overhead. Third, to address communication delay issues, a delay compensation method based on position estimation was designed, which reduces the desired position error of followers during the formation coordination process. Finally, simulation experiments were conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.