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.

In this letter, we study distance-based formation control of single- and double-integrator modeled agents with unknown bounded disturbances. We propose distributed control laws to simultaneously achieve the desired formation shape and eliminate the effects of disturbances. The stability of the systems under the proposed control laws is analyzed based on Lyapunov stability theory of nonsmooth systems and Barbalat’s lemma. Further, sufficient conditions are given to ensure the system to approach the set of desired formation. Finally, simulation results are provided to support the analysis.