A Layered Framework for Formation Control of Multiple Underactuated Autonomous Underwater Vehicles

In recent years, autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) have played an important role in underwater exploration. Researchers are investigating the coordination of multiple AUVs to enhance the efficiency of collaborative tasks. The formation control problem represents a central challenge in this domain. However, current solutions couple the AUVs’ formation characteristics and individual control tasks, significantly complicating the controller design while reducing flexibility and practicality. We propose a layered framework for formation control of multiple underactuated AUVs. This framework decouples AUVs’ formation requirements and individual control challenges into two distinct layers: a swarm coordination (SC) layer and a precise trajectory tracking (PTT) layer. Specifically, the first layer acts as virtual AUVs, and a consensus‐based controller is proposed to generate desired trajectories for AUVs that meet the requirements of complex formation tasks. In the second layer, adaptive controllers are designed based on the kinematic and dynamic models of underactuated AUVs to track the desired trajectories. To increase the convergence speed, both layers can converge in fixed‐time under designed controllers. The effectiveness of the proposed layered framework is validated through simulations involving six AUVs. The results show that the novel layered framework makes multi‐AUVs complete formation tasks well and significantly improves the flexibility and practicality of the systems.