Singleton‐Free Fencing Control of Unknown Maneuver Target

ABSTRACT This paper deals with the fencing control problem of an unknown maneuver target by a multi‐agent system. In contrast with the existing fencing control results, here the target's maneuver can be arbitrarily time‐varying and unknown, although it is reasonably assumed to be bounded. Each agent is informed of its relative positions to its neighbors, and only some agents have access to their relative positions to the target. A distributed estimator is employed to estimate the relative positions to the target for other agents. The distributed estimator provides the target information to the fencing controller and requires a connected communication topology preserved by the controller. To asymptotically fence the target, the unit vector control technique is incorporated into the fencing control to reinforce the cohesion behavior toward the target and the separation behavior from neighbors. The two behaviors work together and reach the potential energy equilibrium in a self‐organizing way. Meanwhile, a singleton‐free behavior via a rotational term is appended to guarantee a singleton‐free final formation. The effectiveness of our design is demonstrated through rigorous Lyapunov analysis and numerical simulations.