Distributed adaptive safety-critical coverage control of multiple autonomous underwater vehicles

This paper addresses the problem of distributed adaptive safety-critical coverage control for multiple autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), and proposes a novel distributed control strategy to simultaneously ensure the safety and coverage of multiple AUVs. For AUVs with disturbances, a hierarchical control strategy is established to alleviate the design difficulty caused by complex AUV models or tasks, enhancing the practicality of the design. Specifically, in the first layer, a distributed coverage controller is designed for the nominal system without disturbances using artificial potential functions, and incorporates it into the closed-loop system as a reference signal for the actual system. The second layer deals with tracking and safety problems of the actual system with disturbances, ensuring tracking of the reference signal generated by the first layer and guaranteeing the safety of AUVs using adaptive Lyapunov functions and adaptive control barrier functions based on disturbance observers, respectively. Additionally, by integrating multiple control objectives into computationally efficient quadratic programming, the coverage and safety control objectives are achieved. Finally, simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy.