Multi-agent formation control for target tracking and circumnavigation missions

Abstract: In this thesis, we study a problem of target tracking and circumnavigation with anetwork of autonomous agents. We propose a distributed algorithm to estimate theposition of the target and to drive the agents to rotate around the target while forminga regular polygon and keeping a desired distance from it. We formally show that thealgorithm attains exponential convergence of the agents to the desired polygon if thetarget is stationary, and bounded convergence if the target is moving with boundedspeed. Numerical simulations in Matlab-Simulink and ROS corroborate the theoreticalresults and demonstrate the resilience of the network to addition and removal of agents.