Finite-time encirclement rotating tracking for surface formation targets with bearing-only measurements

This paper investigates the problem of encirclement rotating tracking for surface formation targets by multiple agents. Unlike most existing studies in which the agent trajectory is considered as a circle with a prescribed radius, the ellipse trajectories of agents changing with formation targets are addressed in this paper. The agents can only measure the bearing information of targets with unknown bounded velocity and acceleration. A least-square (LS) estimator is presented to localize each target and estimate the geometric center of the formation. Then, the target formation is approximated by an ellipse and the corresponding extended ellipse target model is established. To control agent behavior more conveniently, the motion of agent is decomposed into rotation and translation. On this basis, a finite-time control protocol is proposed for agents to travel along the desired trajectory around the extended target within finite time. Finally, a numerical experiment is performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.