Distributed Control for Circumnavigating Multi- Target by a Group of Agents

In this study, a distributed cooperative control law is proposed to attain multi-agent uniform circumnavigation around moving targets. First, we construct a decentralized estimator for each agent to estimate the geometric center of the targets. Then, we develop the distributed control strategy by means of the estimator, which guarantees that the agents preserve the desired distance to the target center and rotate around the targets at uniformly spaced angles. In particular, the topology structure of the agents only needs to be a tree rather than the ring. Thus, the control scheme is more feasible and robust and requires less information. The convergence of the proposed algorithms is demonstrated based on Lasalle's invariance principle and algebraic graph theory. Several numerical simulations are provided to validate the results. Keywords-multi-agent systems; coordination control; decentralized estimator; uniform circumnavigation