This paper studies bearing-based formation control of a group of autonomous agents with the leader-first follower (LFF) structure in an arbitrary dimensional space. Firstly, the bearing-based Henneberg construction and some properties of the LFF formation are introduced. Then, we propose and analyze bearing-only control laws which almost globally stabilize LFF formations to a target formation. Further strategies to rotate and to rescale the target formation are also discussed. Finally, simulation results are provided to support the analysis.

This paper presents a finite-time bearing-only formation control scheme via finite-time estimation of agents’ global orientations. For the orientation estimation, we propose a distributed estimation law and establish almost global finite-time convergence. We provide analysis for undirected and a class of directed sensing and communication graphs. A distributed bearing-only formation control law is then proposed based on the orientation estimation. We provide a rigorous analysis for almost global stability and finite-time convergence of the system to the desired equilibrium. Particularly, under the proposed bearing-only formation control strategy, the actual formation almost globally exponentially finite-time converges to the desired formation shape. Finally, numerical simulations are provided to support our proposed control method.

This paper presents a concise tutorial on iterative learning control (ILC) with an illustrative example. The authors' view of the "big picture" of ILC research is presented with the goal of pinpointing and stimulating future research efforts in the field