Tracking a mobile target by multi-robot circumnavigation using bearing measurements

Abstract

In this paper, we study a problem of target tracking and circumnavigation with a network of autonomous agents. We propose a distributed algorithm to estimate the position of the target and drive the agents to rotate around it while forming a regular polygon and keeping a desired distance. We formally show that the algorithm attains exponential convergence of the agents to the desired polygon if the target is stationary, and bounded convergence if the target is moving with bounded speed. Numerical simulations corroborate the theoretical results and demonstrate the resilience of the network to addition and removal of agents.