Target tracking control with limited communication and steering dynamics

This paper presents a study which extends previous work on collective motion control of a group of vehicles for target tracking. The approach is to drive the group centroid to follow a moving target while keeping all vehicles near the centroid. The provided analysis shows that the system is stable. However, the tracking performance is sensitive to imperfect communication and steering dynamics. Simulation results show the performance degrades significantly when delays and steering dynamics are present. An analysis is provided to identify a major cause of the performance degradation. An alternative control law is proposed in the paper. Comparisons of the simulation results show the improved performance of the new control law.