Distributed control of angle-constrained cyclic formations using bearing-only measurements

This paper studies distributed control of multi-vehicle formations with angle constraints using bearingonlymeasurements. It is assumed that each vehicle can onlymeasure the local bearings of their neighbors and there are no wireless communications among the vehicles. The desired formation is a cyclic one, whose underlying information flow is described by an undirected cycle graph. We propose a distributed bearing-only formation control law that ensures local exponential or finite-time stability. Collision avoidance between any vehicles can be locally guaranteed in the absence of inter-vehicle distance measurements. © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.