Enclosing Control for Multiagent Systems With a Moving Target of Unknown Bounded Velocity

This note studies an enclosing control problem for a multiagent system with a moving target of unknown bounded velocity. The objectives are to let each agent move along a circular orbit with a prescribed radius centered at the target and maintain desired spacing from neighboring agents. A distributed controller composed of three parts is designed by only using the relative position information from each agent to the target and its neighbors. The first two parts are designed to achieve target circling and spacing adjustment, respectively. The last part is designed discontinuously to compensate for the unknown bounded velocity of the target. Due to the discontinuously distributed controller, sufficient conditions are given by a nonsmooth analysis. Furthermore, the agents are shown to have order preservation and collision avoidance properties when the target is stationary. The effectiveness of theoretical results is illustrated by simulations.