| Summary: | This paper is concerned with the coordinated formation control problem of multiple autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) under alterable communication topology and time-varying delay in discrete time domain. Firstly, the multi-AUV system is divided into one leader and multiple followers, and the communication topology is divided into two parts. The coupled nonlinear AUV model is linearized into a second-order integral model using state feedback. Secondly, two types of coordinated controllers in discrete time are proposed: the controller for multi-AUV system without delay, the controller for multi-AUV system with time-varying delay. Then, the formation control issue for multiple AUVs with alterable topology is treated as the asymptotic stability of an error system. The stability analysis of the error system consisting of the state errors between each follower and the leader is performed, to obtain some novel sufficient conditions for achieving the formation control objective. Finally, some simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the theoretical results, and the comparisons describe the effects of communication topology and delay on the performance of the control system.
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