LAUSR

Abstract In this study, we address the formation control problem of multiple autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) in the presence of model uncertainties and ocean-current disturbances. Specifically, we propose a robust distributed leaderless formation control strategy by cross-coupling a synchronous control technique, a nonsingular terminal sliding-mode control approach, and an adaptive control method. We enhance the robustness against system uncertainties by redefining the cross-coupling errors and ensure that the finite-time tracking error converges to zero from any initial value via the designed adaptive nonsingular terminal sliding mode control, which also eliminates the chattering problem. A major advantage of our adaptive control law is neglecting the requirement of any prior knowledge about the upper bounds of the model uncertainties and ocean-current disturbances. Our comparative simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed distributed leaderless formation control scheme.