Multi-AUV Cooperative Target Enclosing with Artificial Potential Field Interaction

With the development of Marine resources research, underwater target enclosing strategy has become an increasingly important research direction. In this paper, a multiple Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUV) cooperative target enclosing strategy with artificial potential field interaction is proposed for three-dimensional underwater environment. An artificial potential field between the AUV and the target will be established at first. The artificial potential field between the AUV and the target will contain both attracitive and repulsive fields. When the AUV position is at a certain distance from the target, the attractive and repulsive forces on the AUV will cancel each other, resulting in a stable structure similar to a covalent bond. Then the mutual repulsive field between AUV s will be established, and the mutual repulsive force will make the AUV s uniformly distributed around the target. With the interaction of these various artificial potential fields, the AUV will enclosing the target at a certain distance. This strategy can realize the enclosing task of the target in the underwater three-dimensional space, and has the advantages of stability and speed. The effectiveness of the strategy is proved by simulation, and the problem of system jitter is solved by adding force threshold to the control strategy.