Distributed coordinated tracking via a variable structure approach - part II: Swarm tracking

This is the second part of a two-part paper on distributed coordinated tracking for a group of autonomous vehicles via a variable structure approach. In the first part of this paper, we investigated distributed consensus tracking algorithms in the presence of a dynamic virtual leader. In the second part of this paper, we focus on the distributed swarm tracking problem where the followers move cohesively with the virtual leader while avoiding inter-vehicle collision with local interaction. In the case of first-order kinematics, we propose a distributed swarm tracking algorithm without velocity measurements. In the case of second-order dynamics, we first propose a distributed swarm tracking algorithm when the velocity of the virtual leader is constant. We then propose a distributed swarm tracking algorithm based on a distributed estimator when the velocity of the virtual leader is dynamic. For distributed swarm tracking in the case of both first-order kinematics and second-order dynamics, a mild connectivity requirement is proposed by adopting a connectivity maintenance mechanism in which the potential function is defined in a proper way. Several simulation examples are presented as a proof of concept.