Distributed Circumnavigation Using Bearing Based Control with Limited Target Information
For multi-agent systems with limited sensing, this work provides a distributed solution to the circumnavigation problem, though it is incremental as it extends existing bearing-based methods to heterogeneous groups with unknown target information.
This paper proposes a distributed bearing-based control law for a heterogeneous group of autonomous agents with unicycle kinematics to circumnavigate a stationary target, where only a subset of agents (leaders) know the target location. The approach ensures global asymptotic stability and is validated through simulations and hardware experiments.
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, 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.