Cooperative Target Fencing for a General Target with Connectivity Preservation

Abstract

In this paper, we study the cooperative target-fencing problem for an n-dimensional target with a general trajectory. The goal is to fence the given target into the convex hull formed by a group of n-dimensional vehicles which are modeled by double-integrator systems. We propose a control law to accomplish this task while avoiding collisions among the vehicles and preserving the connectivity of the communication network. In particular, our approach can handle a target whose position trajectory is any twice continuously differentiable function. Moreover, our result does not rely on the velocity measurements of the vehicles. Thus, it is more practical compared with the existing approaches in the literature. The effectiveness of the proposed method is illustrated by a numerical example.