Cooperative pointing control of collinear double-integrators without angular velocity

Abstract

We deal with the cooperative pointing control problem of collinear double-integrators with unknown rotational inertia in this paper. In particular, we consider the case that the rotational angular velocity information is not available for this coordination task. First, we propose a cooperative pointing control protocol without using the rotational angular velocity measurements. By means of the passivity tool, a distributed estimation scheme is devised to access the relative rotational angular velocity information at each agent via the relative rotational angle information of the agent and its left and respectively right neighbors. Subsequently, we redesign the cooperative pointing control protocol as well as the distributed estimation scheme in the presence of saturated relative rotational angle information. It turns out that, here the unknown rotational inertia does not prevent the coordination task because of the bidirectional interactions. Meanwhile, two local estimation schemes are also presented respectively for the above two control protocols. Besides the rigorous convergence analysis, the effectiveness of our obtained theoretical results is illustrated through numerical simulations.