Distributed control for multi-target circumnavigation by a group of agents
Lingxia Cui, Shihua Chen, Lei Wang · International Journal of Systems Science · 2017
This study investigated the multi-target circumnavigation problem. The multi-target circumnavigation problems involve a group of agents circumnavigating moving targets in a coordinated fashion. To address the problem, a decentralised estimator is first constructed at each agent to estimate the geometric centre of the targets. Then, the distributed control strategy is developed by means of the estimator, which guarantees that the agents preserve the desired distance to the target centre and rotate around the targets at uniformly spaced angles. In particular, the topology structure of the agents only needs to be a tree rather than the ring. Thus, the control scheme is more feasible and robust and requires less information. The convergence of the proposed algorithms is demonstrated based on Lasalle's invariance principle and algebraic graph theory. Several numerical simulations are provided to validate the results.