Distributed Source Seeking via a Circular Formation of Agents Under Communication Constraints

This paper addresses the source-seeking problem in which a group of autonomous vehicles must locate and follow the source of some signal based on measurements of the signal strength at different positions. Based on the observation that the gradient of the signal strength can be approximated by a circular formation of agents via a simple weighted average of the signal measured by each agent, we propose a combination of a cooperative control law to stabilize the agents to a circular formation and a distributed consensus-based source-seeking algorithm, which is guaranteed to steer the circular formation toward the vicinity of the source location. In particular, the proposed algorithm is provided with two tunable parameters that allow for a tradeoff between speed of convergence, noise filtering, and formation stability. The benefit of using consensus-based algorithms resides in a more realist discrete time control of the agents and in asynchronous communication resilient to delays, which is particularly relevant for underwater applications. The analytic results are complemented with numerical simulations.