Obstacle Avoidance for a Swarm of AUVs

This paper uses the bioinformatics-inspired technique for guiding a team of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) towards the desired destination. Here, each AUV estimates the position of the neighbour AUVs while moving towards the destination. The proposed multi-AUV system constitutes a leader AUV and three follower AUVs. A distributed path consensus (DPC) is proposed that determines the distance constraint to ensure the neighbouring agent AUVs maintain a predefined distance between each other and are able to avoid static obstacles while moving towards the respective destinations. It is observed from MATLAB simulation that the co-operative motion control of multiple AUVs along the desired paths and obstacle avoidance is successively achieved. The proposed method solves coordination problems among multiple AUVs and increases the coverage of underwater missions like oceanographic surveys.