Source seeking via collaborative measurements by a circular formation of agents

This paper presents a multi-agent algorithm to address the source-seeking problem in which the task is to locate the source of some signal (e.g., a radio transmitter, a location of chemical contamination, etc.). This algorithm is based on the formation control work of another researcher in which they designed a control structure to stabilize a group of non-holonomic vehicles to a circular formation and also to move that formation by changing the location of its center. The source-seeking algorithm builds on these results by providing an outer-loop control law to move this circular formation towards a source. The resulting control law depends only on direct measurements of the signal to calculate an approximate gradient direction which is then used to steer the formation. Under certain assumptions about the spatial propagation of the signal this algorithm causes the center of the agents' formation to asymptotically converge to the location of the source.