Distributed formation control of multi-vehicle system based on hybrid relative measurements

Formation control has been studied extensively along with the potential applications of multi-vehicle system in various areas. In this paper, a distributed control scheme based on the relative bearing and distance measurements is proposed. The main difference from the existing works lies in that the proposed control scheme can realize unambiguous formation tracking while considering the task-specification and environment constraints under practical bearing and distance sensing conditions. First, the uniqueness of the formation based on relative bearings and distances is investigated and the sufficient condition is provided. Further, the distributed formation controllers that are able to dynamically track the formation with both leaderless and leader-follower setups are designed under practical sensing conditions. In the end, to validate the effectiveness and practicability of the proposed distributed hybrid measurements based formation control scheme, both simulations based on synthetic scenarios and experiments with quadrotors equipping cameras and Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) transmitters are carried out. The simulation and experiment results show that the proposed controllers are able to track the desired formation pattern based on the bearing and distance measurements.