Cooperative control synthesis for moving-target-enclosing with changing topologies

A moving-target-enclosing problem is investigated in the paper, where the velocity of the target is unknown and the neighbor topologies may change over time. Each robot only uses the relative position information of the target and its neighbors that may dynamically change over time. An adaptive scheme is proposed to estimate the velocity of the target. Then a distributed control law for each robot is presented, which consists of two parts: One amounts to ensuring the convergence of the distance between the robots and the target to the desired one and the other is used to achieve the uniform distribution when enclosing the target in motion. Lyapunov-based techniques and graph theory are brought together for rigorous analysis of the convergence and stability properties. Our control strategy is practically implementable with only onboard sensors. Simulations are provided to illustrate our results.