Robust tracking control of bearing-constrained leader–follower formation

Abstract This paper studies a leader–follower formation control problem where the leaders move with constant velocity , the followers know the desired bearing vectors in the target formation and can sense either the displacement vectors or the bearing vectors with regard to several neighboring agents. For both cases, distributed control laws are proposed so that the desired formation is achieved under the presence of unknown bounded uniformly continuous uncertainties in the followers’ model. Except for the assumption that the local reference frames of all agents are aligned, the proposed control laws do not require any relative velocity, bearing rate or information exchange between the agents. The convergence of the target formation is established based on Barbalat’s lemma. Simulation results are also given to support the analysis.