Distributed Tracking and Circumnavigation Using Bearing Measurements

This paper is concerned with the problem of bearings based multi-agent circumnavigation of a maneuvering target. Agents are assumed to have access to their own individual bearing measurements as well as the ones from their immediate neighbors. The aim is to devise a distributed algorithm to estimate the position of the maneuvering target and drive the agents to circumnavigate the target while forming a regular polygon and keeping a desired distance from the target. Analytic results show that the algorithm attains exponential convergence of the agents to a neighborhood of the desired polygon, where the neighborhood size depends on the target speed. Simulation results illustrate the efficacy of the approach.

1. INTRODUCTION

Target tracking and circumnavigation find applications in a wide arena ranging from persistent monitoring and surveillance to oil spill or algal bloom tracking. Such missions often require the sensors to evenly circumscribe the object of interest to collect further information. The problem of driving an autonomous agent around the target has been widely studied in the literature [1]–[4]. Certain applications necessitate a group of autonomous vehicles to be in the proximity of the target and such tasks can be accomplished by moving around the target on a desired circle [5]–[8]. In the case of fixed-wing UAVs, the agents cannot hover at a fixed point, therefore, the task of circling around the target while maintaining the desired formation has been widely investigated.