Cooperative Surveillance of a Moving Target Using a Formation Framework

In this paper we address the formation control problem of generating a formation for a group of nonholonomic mobile agents. The formation control scheme which is proposed in this paper is based on a fusion of leader-follower and the virtual referenced approaches. This scheme gives a formation error representation that is independent of the number of agents in the formation and the resulting control algorithm is scalable. The proposed controller is based on feedback linearization, and formation errors are guaranteed to be globally asymptotically stable. As a possible application, the proposed algorithm is implemented on the cooperative ground moving target surveillance problem. The controller design algorithm is verified through computer simulations.