Cooperative fencing control of multiple second‐order vehicles for a moving target with and without velocity measurements

Abstract

This article studies the moving-target-fencing problem of multiple second-order vehicles, where the target moves with an unknown constant velocity. Without a predefined stand-off distance or formation, two classes of local cooperative controllers are proposed with and without velocity measurements. Specifically, the first controller uses the relative position information from the target and vehicle's neighbors, as well as the vehicle's velocity measurement, while the second controller relaxes the common requirement of velocity measurement of the vehicles. It is proved that both controllers simultaneously assure target fencing, collision avoidance, and velocity convergence. Finally, numerical simulations are provided to verify the efficacy of the proposed controllers.

Cooperative label-free moving target fencing for second-order multi-agent systems with rigid formation

“…Remark 3.2 From the controller (9), the position state x d , albeit available to each agent, is not the final convergent steady state, which is different from centralized controllers (like star topology). In other words, the steady states of agents in (9) are distributedly calculated by the attraction domain of the target and the local interactions of agents, which is well accepted in most label-free fencing papers [18][19][20][21][22]. Moreover, when the target position x d is only available to a small partial of the agents in real applications, the position x d could be transferred to each agent via communication network in finite time, see, e.g., [25].…”

“…are the position and velocity of the target, respectively. If s 1 = 0 in (4), the target in (3) moves with a constant velocity, see e.g., [22]. If s 1 < 0, the target moves periodically with a variational velocity.…”

“…A cooperative controller consisting of attractive, repulsive, and rotational inter-agent forces was developed in [20] to fence a specified stationary target. Afterwards, an interesting problem to fence a target with a constant velocity was addressed for first-order MASs [21], secondorder MASs [22,23] and multiple unmanned surface vessels [24].…”

“…So far, most of existing works [18][19][20] only considered label-free fencing for first-order MASs and have not systematically considered the formation evolution during entire fencing processes, which is however essential in practice, such as unmanned-system convey protection, reconnaissance, patrol, etc. Although a few recent works [21][22][23][24] studied the rigid formation with a constant-velocity target, a more challenging scenario of fencing a moving target with variational velocity still remains a dilemma. Thus, it becomes an urgent yet challenging mission to propose a label-free controller for second-order MASs to achieve collision-free rigid-formation fencing for a variational-velocity target.…”

“…The novelty of this paper is two-fold. First of all, unlike relevant prior label-free fencing works for a static target [18][19][20] and a constant-velocity target [21][22][23][24], the present study regards the target as an exosystem. Thereby, it proposes a label-free controller consisting of a dynamic regulator and an inter-agent repulsion to address a more challenging fencing problem with a variational-velocity target.…”