Cooperative Target-capturing with Incomplete Target Information

This paper presents a distributed target-centric formation control strategy for multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the presence of target motion uncertainty. The formation is maintained around a target using a combination of a consensus protocol and a sliding mode control law. Consensus helps in distributing the target information which is available only to a subset of vehicles. Sliding mode control compensates for the uncertainty in the target information. Hence, collectively the combined strategy enforces each of the vehicles to maintain its respective position in the formation. We show that if at least one vehicle in a group has target information with some uncertainty and the corresponding communication graph is connected, then a target-centric formation can be maintained. The performance of the proposed strategy is illustrated through simulations.