An Integrated Experimental System for Unmanned Underwater Vehicle Swarm Control

Unmanned Underwater Vehicle (UUV) swarms have become increasingly crucial for underwater exploration and applications, where their coordinated operation offers significant advantages over single-vehicle systems. However, unlike single-vehicle systems, the development of swarm control systems is more complicated, especially because there are limited integrated toolchains that can cover both global scheme design and individual vehicle implementation. Engineers may have to develop a global scheme and then partition it manually for individual vehicle implementation, which can result in substantial efficiency losses. To address this difficulty, an integrated experimental framework is developed to support the complete workflow of UUV swarm control development, from unified algorithm design and system simulation to automated code generation and individual deployment. The architecture of the proposed platform incorporates three principal elements: a global simulation environment that enables virtual validation of swarm collective behavior, a rapid prototyping module that facilitates code generation/partitioning and individual implementation, and a digital twin visualization component that provides real-time monitoring capabilities. A case study demonstrates that the platform can integrate global design with individual implementation. In a comparative experiment where the same engineering team implemented a three-UUV formation control algorithm, the use of our platform reduced the time from algorithm design to successful deployment from an estimated 6 h (using manual coding and integration) to under one hour, representing about an 80% reduction in development time.