Wukong1000 AUVs: Design, Cooperative Implementation, and Experimental Validation

ABSTRACT This paper presents the design, cooperative implementation, and experimental validation of an autonomous underwater vehicle swarm system–the Wukong1000 AUVs. The primary contributions of this work include: (i) The AUV's overall design work was conducted to meet pressure resistance requirements and seabed surveying mission needs, including hull form and general arrangement design, structural design and strength verification, and hydrodynamic performance validation. (ii) For multi‐AUV formation cooperative mission requirements, a modular, network‐centric responsive software and hardware framework was designed to facilitate the scalability of the AUV swarm. (iii) A swarm system consisting of three AUVs (one leader and two followers) was established, featuring an integrated acoustic communication and ranging system for cooperative formation navigation and control. Through comprehensive lake trials, the multi‐mission execution capabilities of the swarm system were fully validated: a 3‐AUV formation bathymetric mapping mission achieved high‐resolution coverage of within 5000 s under a 96.23% communication success rate; autonomous homing of AUVs using only low‐cost range information under dual‐motion conditions was successfully demonstrated; and high‐precision optical‐guided autonomous recovery tests were successfully conducted in an ice‐hole environment. These trials collectively validated the system's reliability and multi‐mission adaptability.