Leader-follower Cooperative Navigation with communication delays for Multi AUVs

In this paper, we consider the problem of Cooperative Navigation(CN) with communication delays for Multiple Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (MAUVs). In the Leader-follower cooperative structure, one master AUV is equipped with high precision navigation system, and several slaver AUVs are equipped with low precision navigation system. To sharing information, inter-vehicle communication is becoming an important requirement for Cooperative Localization. However, due to the terrible underwater environment, acoustic communication is still a difficult challenge for AUVs until now. Taking into account the communication delays, an Uncorrelated Consistent Delay Filter(UCDF) for Cooperative Navigation is designed by taking in to account the correlation between the past input error and the current state error in the state transition process. At the end of this paper, simulation results are provided to prove the superiority and practicality of the proposed DEKF algorithm.