Coordinated Localization and Circumnavigation of Multi-Agent Systems: A Distributed Observer-Based Approach

This paper investigates the distributed localization and circumnavigation problem for a group of agents using only bearing measurements. In particular, there is one agent appointed as the pathfinder in the group who is responsible for measuring the relative bearing with respect to an uncertain target. The objective is to drive all the agents such that they first localize the given target and then circumnavigate it with equal spacing. A distributed control algorithm is developed by introducing a distributed observer. In terms of Lyapunov theorem, it is shown that the proposed control algorithm guarantees the achievement of the localization and circumnavigation objective. Experiment results verify the effectiveness of the proposed distributed control algorithm.