Bearing-Based Target Entrapping Control of Multiple Uncertain Agents With Arbitrary Maneuvers

TL;DR

This paper presents a bearing-based control method for multiple uncertain agents to achieve target entrapping under arbitrary maneuvers, ensuring convergence and collision avoidance through estimation and formation control techniques.

Contribution

It introduces a novel estimation-based control approach that handles uncertainties and arbitrary maneuvers in multi-agent bearing-based formation control.

Findings

Proven asymptotic convergence of estimation and control errors.

Effective collision avoidance condition established.

Validated in 2D and 3D simulations.

Abstract

This paper is concerned with bearing-based cooperative target entrapping control of multiple uncertain agents with arbitrary maneuvers including shape deformation, rotations, scalings, etc. A leader-follower structure is used, where the leaders move with the predesigned trajectories, and the followers are steered by an estimation-based control method, integrating a distance estimator using bearing measurements and a stress matrix-based formation controller. The signum functions are used to compensate for the uncertainties so that the agents' accelerations can be piecewise continuous and bounded to track the desired dynamics. With proper design of the leaders' trajectories and a geometric configuration, an affine matrix is determined so that the persistently exciting conditions of the inter-agent relative bearings can be satisfied since the bearing rates are related to different weighted combinations of the affine matrix vectors. The asymptotic convergence of the estimation error and control error is proved using Filipov properties and cascaded system theories. A sufficient condition for inter-agent collision avoidance is also proposed. Finally, simulation results are given to validate the effectiveness of the method in both 2D and 3D cases.