Distributed control of cooperative multi-target enclosing by ring-coupled unicycles

This paper investigates the cooperative multi-target enclosing problem by an autonomous vehicle team. In this paper, each vehicle only needs to detect and interact with one of its teammates. As a whole team, the interaction relationship between the vehicles forms a directed ring-coupled topology. At the same time, each vehicle can detect some of the targets but not all of them. This paper proposes a distributed control law with a very simple form. The proposed control law uses relative positions measurements to drive each vehicle to circle around its target from a specified radius. The proposed control law also spreads the vehicles around their targets with a specified pattern. Furthermore, we show that with proper control parameter design, this control law enables vehicles which do not detect any target to coordinate with its neighboring vehicles to enclose the targets without exchanging the target location information. The result is validated with simulations.