Cooperative circumnavigation by multiple second-order agents with prescribed formations

Abstract

This paper studies the target circumnavigation problem by multiple second-order agents under directed topology. All agents need to surround the target with prescribed formation and circular velocity. Firstly, according to the control objectives, the cooperative circumnavigation problem is converted into the stability problem of the corresponding error system. Then, the error system is divided into two second-order subsystems, and a distributed controller comprised of two parts is delivered. The stability analysis of the whole system is given by the employing cascaded control theory. One key merit of the proposed controller is that the prescribed formation is an extensive case and unlimited, including different tracking radii and angular spacing. Another merit is that the communication topology among agents only needs to have a directed spanning tree. Furthermore, the controller can be implemented by each agent in its local frame so that only local information is utilised without knowing global information. These all extend the scope of practical application, the controller is more universal. Finally, the simulations validate the effectiveness of the proposed controllers.

Keywords:

• Circumnavigation
• multiple second-order agents
• distributed control
• backstepping
• cascaded system

Data availability statement

Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data were created or analysed in this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant numbers 61871221 and 62171223] and in part by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities [grant number 309201B8811].

Notes on contributors

Chunyan Zhang

Chunyan Zhang received her Ph.D. degree in Nanjing University of Science and Technology, in 2020. She is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at the same university. Her current research interests include target tracking, measurement and control technology.

Deren Kong

Deren Kong received his Ph.D. degrees in Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing, in 2003. He is currently a Professor at the same university. His main research interests include the test technology of dynamic parameters.