Unicycle Mobile Robots Formation Tracking: Application to Dynamic Target Entrapping

In this paper, we address the distributed Time-Varying Formation tracking problem for a Multi-Agent Systems (MASs) featured by general linear dynamics. The proposed formation control is based on relative output measurement exchange, thus, a linear observer has been used to estimate the neighboring agents state. In this work the communication topology among agents is assumed to be directed and contains a directed spanning tree, which is a practical assumption in real applications. Moreover, the MASs is supposed to track a desired formation shape while following a virtual leader having zero control input, where its output measurement is available to only a subset of agents, and at least the root node of the spanning tree has access to leader’s output. An adaptive gain scheduling technique is employed to estimate the coupling weights between neighboring agents. The proposed formation tracking has been adapted and applied to realize a target tracking and entrapping application by a formation of unicycle mobile robots, where the target plays the role of a passive leader. Finally, a simulation example is given to illustrate and to show the effectiveness and the conjecture of the theoretical results.