Adaptive swarm control of AUVs : a delay-tolerant autonomous communication timing scheduling mechanism

This paper investigates the distributed formation control problem of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) subject to limited communication resources and transmission delays. Objectives To address channel competition and congestion caused by concurrent communication among multiple agents, an interleaved time-sequence communication mechanism is proposed. Methods The mechanism presets communication triggering conditions for each formation member and allocates mutually interleaved communication permission timelines, which ensures each agent exclusive access to communication bandwidth while reducing communication resource overhead. Considering that transmission delays lead to lagged interactive information, a state predictor based on delayed data and timestamps is further designed to predict the current states of neighbors and improve the timeliness of control information. In addition, model-free adaptive control is introduced to suppress the impacts of marine environmental disturbances and model parameter uncertainties on formation control. Results Stability analysis verifies that the proposed control method can guarantee the prescribed-time stability of the system. Simulation results show that the proposed method can effectively avoid channel competition and congestion problems. When combined with the time-delay prediction compensation scheme, the system achieves smaller cumulative formation errors, which fully demonstrates the superiority of the proposed method. Conclusions The proposed method can realize orderly communication scheduling under communication constraints, effectively suppress communication time-delay disturbances and improve formation control performance.