Bearing-Only Formation Control of Multi-Agent Systems using a Signed Protocol

This paper presents a new signed protocol for bearing-only formation control of homogeneous multi-agent system consisting of single integrator agents. The agents com-municate over an undirected interaction topology, and the desired formation is specified by inter-neighbour bearings. A bearing-only controller that moves the agent in a direction normal to the desired bearings based on the location of the agent with respect to desired bearing vector is presented. To uniquely specify the centroid and scale of the formation, a leader-follower configuration is analyzed, along with the leader-less case. Stability and convergence of the multi-agent system with the proposed controller are analyzed using Lyapunov techniques. It is shown that, using the proposed distributed bearing-only formation control, the formation converges to the desired bearing-rigid formation. As the proposed controller uses sign function rather than absolute magnitude, it requires accurate inter-neighbour bearing measurements only near its desired bearing direction. This eliminates the requirement for accurate sensors during controller implementation. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed controller for formation control with and without leader agents.