A Novel Distributed Algorithm for Consensus under Digraph Topology with Uncertain Target Information

This paper presents a novel consensus tracking protocol for a group of double integrator agents. The target to be tracked is maneuvering with a non-zero bounded acceleration. It is assumed that at least one agent knows target's position and velocity. In this work, we assume that relative state measurements (position, velocity, and acceleration) are unavailable to the agents. Thus, consensus-based estimators are proposed under a digraph communication topology to tackle the effect of the absence of relative state measurements. The estimators of each agent cooperatively estimate the position, velocity, and acceleration of the moving target in fixed-time. A simple finite-time tracking controller is designed for each agent to ensure the tracking of these estimates by individual agents. The distributed gains can be chosen accordingly to set a desired convergence time for the estimators. A fixed-time tracking controller is also proposed in this paper. Comparison with the existing work, done through simulation, reveals the superiority of the proposed protocols.