Co-operative control of a team of autonomous underwater vehicles in an obstacle-rich environment

This paper presents the cooperative control of a team of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) in the presence of obstacles under environmental disturbance. A leader-follower formation control based on optimisation algorithms using communication topology is designed to navigate towards the target in the presence of obstacles. CLONAL selection optimisation algorithm may be employed as team controller by providing the optimal position to hierarchical control strategy for each AUV incorporating learning, memory and affinity. But unfortunately CLONAL selection optimisation algorithm fails to avoid obstacles because some of the lymphocytes become memory cells of the system. The above prematurity may be overcome by using artificial potential fields and ant colony optimisation technique combined with CLONAL selection optimisation algorithm. The efficacy of the proposed optimisation is verified through MATLAB simulation and the result confirmed the robustness and proficiency of proposed technique over CLONAL selection optimisation algorithm.