Cooperative multi-AUV convoy protection with ocean currents

In this paper we study a coordination problem of controlling a group of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUV) to provide convoy protection to maritime surface vehicle, consider one AUV can not provide continuous protection with the bounded turning radius and speed, we first present a time-optimal path to a stationary maritime surface vehicle and propose a control strategy to keep convoy protection to the surface vehicle moving on a straight line, then we develop an adaptive design to recover the desired formation when the flow velocity is unknown, finally the simulation results are given, which demonstrate the satisfactory effectiveness of the algorithm.