Control of open contour formations of autonomous underwater vehicles

In this paper, we propose a distributed elastic behaviour for a deformable chain-like formation of small autonomous underwater vehicles with the task of forming special shapes which have been explicitly defined or are defined by some iso-contour of an environmental concentration field. In the latter case, the formation has to move in such a way as to meet certain formation parameters as well as adapt to the iso-line. We base our controller on our previous models (for manually controlled end points) using general curve evolution theory but will also propose appropriate motions for the end robots of an open chain.