Robust Cooperative Moving Path Following Control for Marine Robotic Vehicles

Matheus F Reis; R Praveen Jain; A Pedro Aguiar; Joao Borges de Sousa

doi:10.3389/frobt.2019.00121

Robust Cooperative Moving Path Following Control for Marine Robotic Vehicles

Front Robot AI. 2019 Nov 21:6:121. doi: 10.3389/frobt.2019.00121. eCollection 2019.

Authors

Matheus F Reis¹, R Praveen Jain¹, A Pedro Aguiar¹, Joao Borges de Sousa¹

Affiliation

¹ Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, University of Porto, Porto, Portugal.

Abstract

This paper presents results on recent developments pertaining to the coordinated motion control of a fleet of marine robotic vehicles. Specifically, we address the Cooperative Moving Path Following (CMPF) motion control problem, that consists of steering the robotic vehicles along a priori specified geometric paths that jointly move according to a target frame, while achieving a pre-defined coordination objective. To this end, each vehicle will need to communicate with their neighbors in order to cooperatively solve the CMPF task. Two distinct robust Moving Path Following motion control strategies for achieving robustness on the moving path following tasks are proposed. Experimental results demonstrating the application of CMPF to marine vehicles in the context of source localization and tracking of underwater targets are presented backed with stability and convergence guarantees.

Keywords: cooperative control; marine robotics; path following; robust control; underactuated robotics.