Distributed Target Localization and Enclosing Control for Mobile Agents with Bearing Measurements

This work addresses the localization and enclosing problem of a target which is stationary or moving by a group of mobile agents. Each agent is assumed to know its bearing angle with respect to the target. Using the bearing angle to the target, an estimator is proposed for each agent to localize the target, and a distributed control law is then designed. It is shown that when the target is stationary or moving with a bounded velocity, the group of agents globally converge to an exact uniform circular formation around the target or its neighborhood, respectively. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is illustrated via simulations.