Formation Control and Network Localization via Distributed Global Orientation Estimation in 3-D

In this paper, we propose a novel distributed formation control strategy, which is based on the measurements of relative position of neighbors, with global orientation estimation in 3-dimensional space. Since agents do not share a common reference frame, orientations of the local reference frame are not aligned with each other. Under the orientation estimation law, a rotation matrix that identifies orientation of local frame with respect to a common frame is obtained by auxiliary variables. The proposed strategy includes a combination of global orientation estimation and formation control law. Since orientation of each agent is estimated in the global sense, formation control strategy ensures that the formation globally exponentially converges to the desired formation in 3-dimensional space.