Cooperative Trajectory Planning for Simultaneous Target Approaching in Multi-AUV Systems

Simultaneous target approaching is a fundamental ability for multiple autonomous underwater vehicle (multi-AUV) systems to continuously move toward the target for surrounding, capturing, information gathering, etc., and the efficiency and accuracy of the approaching heavily rely on the qualities of planned trajectories. This work presents a cooperative trajectory planning method for the simultaneous approaching of multi-AUV systems, and further provides strategies for connectivity maintenance and position errors to enhance the adaptability in practical uses. To be specific, a cooperative planning framework is designed with the inspiration of sensor selection, where trajectory planning is converted to a successive candidate selection problem and modeled as convex optimization. Under the framework, the considered simultaneous approaching, connectivity maintenance, and position errors are formulated as constraints and integrated into one convex optimization problem, which can be easily solved via well-established solvers. Various simulations and field experiments have validated the advantages of the proposed method by comparisons with alternative methods.