Cooperative Target Fencing of Multiple Vehicles for a General Target with Connectivity Preservation and Collision Avoidance

In this paper, the authors study the cooperative target-fencing problem for n-dimensional systems and a target with a general trajectory. Without using the velocity of the vehicles, a position feedback control law is proposed to fence the general target into the convex hull formed by the vehicles. Specifically, the dynamics of each vehicle is described by a double-integrator system. Two potential functions are designed to guarantee connectivity preservation of the communication network and collision avoidance among the vehicles. The proposed approach can deal with a target whose trajectory is any twice continuously differentiable function of time. The effectiveness of the result is verified by a numerical example.