Containment control of networked autonomous underwater vehicles using output information

This paper considers the containment control of networked autonomous underwater vehicles in the presence of multiple dynamic leaders under a directed graph. Each vehicle is subject to model uncertainty, ocean disturbances, and unmeasured velocity information. Distributed output-feedback containment controllers are devised based on an observer, a tracking differentiator, iterative neural networks, and a dynamic surface control technique, under which containment can be achieved regardless of model uncertainty, unknown ocean disturbances, and unmeasured velocity information. Lyapunov-Krasovskii functionals are employed to show the uniform ultimate boundedness of closed-loop network signals. Simulation results are given to show the control performance of the proposed method.