Cooperative Target Tracking of Multiple Autonomous Surface Vehicles Under Switching Interaction Topologies

This paper is concerned with the cooperative target tracking of multiple autonomous surface vehicles(ASVs)under switching interaction topologies.For the target to be tracked,only its position can be measured/received by some of the ASVs,and its velocity is unavailable to all the ASVs.A distributed extended state observer taking into consideration switching topologies is designed to integrally estimate unknown target dynamics and neighboring ASVs'dynamics.Accordingly,a novel kinematic controller is designed,which takes full advantage of known information and avoids the approximation of some virtual control vectors.Moreover,a disturbance observer is presented to estimate unknown time-varying environmental disturbance.Furthermore,a distributed dynamic controller is designed to regulate the involved ASVs to cooperatively track the target.It enables each ASV to adjust its forces and moments according to the received information from its neighbors.The effectiveness of the derived results is demonstrated through cooperative target tracking performance analysis for a tracking system composed of five interacting ASVs.

Multi-UAV cooperative target tracking with bounded noise for connectivity preservation

We investigate cooperative target tracking of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles(UAVs)with a limited communication range.This is an integration of UAV motion control,target state estimation,and network topology control.We first present the communication topology and basic notations for network connectivity,and introduce the distributed Kalman consensus filter.Then,convergence and boundedness of the estimation errors using the filter are analyzed,and potential functions are proposed for communication link maintenance and collision avoidance.By taking stable target tracking into account,a distributed potential function based UAV motion controller is discussed.Since only the estimation of the target state rather than the state itself is available for UAV motion control and UAV motion can also affect the accuracy of state estimation,it is clear that the UAV motion control and target state estimation are coupled.Finally,the stability and convergence properties of the coupled system under bounded noise are analyzed in detail and demonstrated by simulations.