Adaptive Bearing-Only Formation Tracking Control for Nonholonomic Multiagent Systems

In this article, we consider the formation tracking problem of nonholonomic multiagent systems only using relative bearing measurements between the agents. Such a practical and important yet challenging issue has been taken into limited consideration by existing approaches, which usually requires additional measurements such as relative positions. The contributions of this article are two-fold. First, a fully distributed reference velocity estimator is proposed. Under the proposed adaptive estimator, each agent can estimate the time-varying reference velocity asymptotically. Second, an input-to-state stable controller is designed according to the bearing rigid theory. Under the proposed controller, the formation with bearing-only constraints can be achieved. Finally, the proposed scheme is demonstrated and its effectiveness is verified by presenting some simulation and experimental tests.