Distributed Formation Target Tracking in Local Coordinate Systems

This paper studies the formation target tracking problem, where a team of agents is controlled to form a prescribed formation with its centroid tracking a moving target. A distributed control strategy is proposed to solve the problem using only the relative position information from the target and its neighbors in local coordinate systems. In view of the fact that only a subset of agents can measure the target, a distributed target estimator in local coordinate systems is thus proposed. A key advantage of the proposed distributed control strategy is that the global information, such as the number of agents or the second smallest eigenvalue of the Laplacian matrix is not needed. Theoretical analysis shows that the closed loop control system is asymptotically stable and the desired formation target tracking can be achieved. Simulations testify that the desired formation could be achieved while its centroid eventually tracks the target.