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.