Energy-Efficiency Formation Control of AUVs via Angle Measurement: A Minimally Rigid-Based Solution
研究了通过单矢量水听器测量相对角度来实现自主水下航行器（AUV）的能效编队控制，提出了最小角度刚性拓扑生成算法和基于逆强化学习的编队控制器，以降低通信能耗并提高稳定性。
Formation control of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) has been regarded as the basis of many sophisticated marine missions. However, the complex marine environment and the high communication energy consumption make it hard to achieve this task. This article is concerned with an energy-efficiency formation issue of AUVs via angle measurement. Particularly, the single vector hydrophone is used to measure the single-frequency signal emitted by AUVs, through which the relative angles among AUVs can be estimated. Based on this, a minimally angle rigid topology generation algorithm is designed to balance the tradeoff between communication energy efficiency and topology connectivity, while a model-free inverse reinforcement learning (IRL)-based formation controller is developed to steer AUVs to reach the target while maintaining a specific shape. The innovations are summarized as follows: 1) the angle measurement in this article can eliminate the reliance on the position information of AUVs; 2) the minimally angle rigid topology in this article can improve the formation stability and reduce the communication energy consumption as compared to the neighboring rule-based solutions; and 3) the IRL-based controller can avoid manually designing cost functions and improve environmental adaptability as compared to traditional-learning-based controllers. Finally, simulation and experimental results are both conducted to verify the effectiveness.