Robust synchronized motion of parent-child autonomous underwater vehicles

This paper studies synchronized motion of the parent-child autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) system. The dynamical models of both the parent AUV and child AUV are mathematically given in form of fully-actuated Euler-Lagrange equation. Then, a master (parent)-slave (child) synchronization scheme is established. Since that the master system and slave system in the scheme are different with parameter uncertainty and environmental disturbance uncertainty, a definition of synchronized motion with error bound is introduced. By means of Lyapunov´s stability theory, some sufficient synchronized motion criteria are derived and the corresponding synchronization error bound is estimated. A numerical example is illustrated to verify the main results, finally.