Distributed Circumnavigation Using Bearing Based Control with Limited Target Information

TL;DR

This paper presents a distributed control strategy for autonomous agents to circumnavigate a stationary target using limited sensing, with stability guaranteed and validated through simulations and hardware experiments.

Contribution

It introduces a novel guidance law for heterogeneous agents with limited target information, ensuring global stability in circumnavigation tasks.

Findings

Successful hardware implementation on TurtleBots

Proven global asymptotic stability via Zubov's theorem

Effective coordination with limited sensing capabilities

Abstract

In this paper, we address the problem of circumnavigation of a stationary target by a heterogeneous group comprising of $\textbf{n}$ autonomous agents, having unicycle kinematics. The agents are assumed to have constant linear speeds, we control only the angular speeds. Assuming limited sensing capabilities of the agents, in the proposed framework, only a subset of agents, termed as \textit{leaders}, know the target location. The rest, termed as \textit{followers}, do not. We propose a distributed guidance law which drives all the agents towards the desired objective; global asymptotic stability (GAS) is ensured by using Zubov's theorem. The efficacy of the approach is demonstrated through both numerical simulations and hardware experiments on the TurtleBots utilising OptiTrack motion capture system.