Coordinated circumnavigation by multiple agents under directed topology

ABSTRACT

This paper focuses on the coordinated circumnavigation problem for multiple agents with directed communication topology. All agents are required to be evenly spaced around a moving target, and orbit around it with prescribed radii and circular velocity. We divide the coordinated circumnavigation system into a cascaded system consisting of a standoff tracking subsystem and a spacing distribution subsystem. A tracking controller and an additional controller for the two subsystems are developed, respectively. The global uniform stability of the coordinated circumnavigation system is analysed using the cascaded control theory. The presented controllers render each individual agent circumnavigating the target with the desired requirements. More importantly, we show that the derived tracking controller is a general extension of existing controllers for single agent circumnavigation problem. Another feature of the proposed controllers is that the directed topology considered only needs to have a directed spanning tree. Furthermore, the proposed controllers take the velocity constraints into consideration, that is more rational for practical applications. Numerical simulations are provided to verify the effectiveness of the proposed methods.

KEYWORDS:

• Circumnavigation
• distributed control
• multiple agents
• cascaded system
• velocity constraint

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Yinya Li http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3535-2343

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work has been partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant numbers 61871221, 61273076, 61773210, and 61876024] and the National Defense Basic Research Project of China [grant number JCKY2018209B010].

Notes on contributors

Chunyan Zhang

Chunyan Zhang received the B.S. degree in the School of Automation from Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing, China, in 2012, where she is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree in control science and engineering with the School of Automation. Her current research interests include multi-agent system, networked control and target tracking.

Yinya Li

Yinya Li received his Ph.D. degree in 2006 in the School of Automation, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing, China. He joined the School of Automation, Nanjing University of Science and Technology in 2006 as a Lecturer. From 2009 to 2018, he has been working as an associate professor in the School of Automation, Nanjing University of Science and Technology. He is currently a professor in the School of Automation, Nanjing University of Science and Technology. He was a visiting scholar with the Department of Mechanical and Biomedical Engineering, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong, China, from 2017 to 2018, and a visiting research scholar with the Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, NT, Hong Kong, China, from 2018 to 2019. His research interests include nonlinear estimation, passive target localization and tracking, and multi-agent system.

Guoqing Qi

Guoqing Qi received his Ph.D. degree in 2006 in the School of Automation, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, China. He joined the School of Automation, Nanjing University of Science and Technology in 2006 as a Lecturer. Since 2010, he has been working as an associate professor in the School of Automation, Nanjing University of Science and Technology. His current research interests include maneuvering target tracking, multi-sensor data fusion, UAV navigation and applications.

Andong Sheng

Andong Sheng received his Ph.D. degree in 1990 in the Department of Control Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology, China. From 1995 to 1997, he was a visiting fellow in the Department of Computer Science, Chiba Institute of Technology, Japan. From 1999 to 2001, he has been working as an associate professor in the School of Automation, Nanjing University of Science and Technology. He is currently a professor in the School of Automation, Nanjing University of Science and Technology. His current research interests include multi-sensor data fusion, nonlinear estimation theory and applications.