Trajectory planning for multiple autonomous underwater vehicles with safety guarantees

This paper addresses the trajectory planning for multiple autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) in strong waves that can disturb the AUVs' trajectory tracking ability and cause obstacle and inter-vehicle collisions. A novel approach based on Hamilton-Jacobi differential game formulation and model predictive control is proposed to generate safety-guaranteed trajectories for AUV systems considering wave disturbance that is either time-varying state-independent or time-varying state-dependent. This approach plans safety-guaranteed trajectories for multiple AUVs and considers the shapes of AUVs, where nonlinear smooth collision avoidance constraints are obtained via strong duality.