Research On Formation Control And Coordination Of Multiple Underwater Robots

Oceans will play a very important role in the development of human society. Autonomous underwater vehicle(AUV) is a very useful tool in exploring and utilizing resources in oceans. As the key technology of AUV, the coordination of multiple AUVs has become the current research focus. The research on the cooperation and coordination of multiple AUVs is of great both academic and applied significance to improve the intelligence degree and quicken the practice course of AUVs.The project, "Key Techniques in Multi-objective Cooperation and Control Architecture of AUVs", is financed by the Research Fund for the Doctoral Program from the Ministry of Education and the Post-Doctor Research Fund of Heilongjiang Province. This paper makes some researches on multi-robot cooperation and coordination of the project.Firstly, the underwater dynamic environment modeling and path-planning of AUVs are presented and discussed. Having measured the advantages and disadvantages of former methods, this paper adopts the Cell Decomposition modeling method, and then plans a collision-free path for every robot in dynamic environment by using the heuristic D star algorithm. Then the hybrid AUVs control architecture is designed. In this paper an approach of formation control for multiple robots based on strategy of decomposition is proposed. The complicated problem of formation of multi-robots is decomposed into some basic problems of coordination between two robots. The basic model of multi-robots formation is built in this paper. A control strategy ofmaster-slaved to multi-robots formation is proposed. Behaviors of multi-robots are designed respectively based on approach of behavior-based, and the control method of velocities of robots is proposed in this paper. Moreover, these approaches and strategies are extended to large complex formations. The simulation result of computer shows that the approach is effective and feasible.