Optimal Decentralized Control for Leader-Follower Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Swarm with Asymmetric Information Structure

In this paper, we will investigate the optimal de-centralized control problem for leader-follower autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) swarm with asymmetric information structure. Unlike most existing studies, we consider the case in an AUV swarm where the information sets accessed by the leader AUV and the follower AUV are inconsistent. By adopting the orthogonal decomposition method, the optimal decentralized control strategy is derived. Specifically, the contribution of this paper can be summarized as follows: Firstly, we formulate a leader-follower AUV swarm control problem as an optimal decentralized linear quadratic tracking (LQT) control problem. Secondly, the optimal iterative estimation is derived by the use of the independence of the state of the follower AUV when the state information of the leader AUV is known. Thirdly, the optimal decentralized control strategy is derived by orthogonal decomposition method, based on the derived optimal iterative estimation. Finally, the effectiveness of the optimal decentralized control strategy is verified by simulations.