Leader-following consensus of discrete-time multi-AUV recovery system with time-varying delay

This paper is concerned with the leader-following consensus of discrete-time multi-AUV recovery systems with time-varying delay. During the recycling process, the mothership is regarded as a leader, and AUVs are regarded as followers. The multi-AUV recovery problem is transformed into the leader-following coordinated control problem. A new leader-following consensus control protocol with time-varying delay for discrete-time multi-AUV recovery systems is proposed by modeling directed fixed communication topology. New stability criteria are established to guarantee the consensus of the multi-AUV recovery system based on suitable Lyapunov-Krosovskii functional and a set of linear matrix inequalities. Therefore, the controller gains are derived. Finally, simulation results are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of theoretical results.