FTISS Adaptive Bearing-Only Formation Tracking Control with Unknown Disturbance Rejection

TL;DR

The paper addresses bearing-based formation control without a shared global frame in the presence of unknown constant disturbances. It develops a novel FTISS bearing-only control law that relies solely on local bearing measurements and elevation-angle rigidity, achieving finite-time convergence to a neighborhood followed by asymptotic convergence, and it extends this approach to moving leaders with unknown constant velocity. The method does not require inter-agent communication and is supported by a Lyapunov-based FTISS analysis. The authors validate the approach through simulations in 2D/3D and real quadcopter experiments, demonstrating robust disturbance rejection and leader-tracking capabilities.

Abstract

This paper proposes a finite-time input-to-state stable (FTISS) bearing-only formation control law that rejects unknown constant disturbances. Unlike existing finite-time bearing-based formation control laws, which typically rely on the availability of a global coordinate frame and some information about the disturbances, our approach requires only local bearing vector measurements and does not necessitate the alignment of agent coordinate frames. The proposed control law guarantees that formation control errors converge to a neighborhood of zero in finite time, and subsequently converge to zero asymptotically. We first address the scenario where leaders are stationary and then extend the results to leaders moving with a constant velocity. Simulation and experimental results are presented to validate the effectiveness of the proposed control law.

Figures (7)

• Figure 1: Formation control of three drones arranged in a triangular configuration.
• Figure 2: Elevation angles in 2D.
• Figure 3: Elevation angles in 3D.
• Figure 4: FTISS bearing-only formation control with stationary leaders in 3D.
• Figure 5: FTISS bearing-only formation tracking control with moving leaders in 2D.