Distributed Bearing-Only Formation Control for Heterogeneous Nonlinear Multi-Robot Systems

This paper addresses the bearing-only formation tracking problem for heterogeneous nonlinear multi-robot systems. In contrast to position and distance-based formation algorithms, the robots can only measure the bearing information from their neighbors to achieve cooperation while the state information is unavailable. This characteristic is able to be implemented in the hardware to reduce the requirements of the sensors. We construct a compensation function in the proposed controller to eliminate the effect of the unknown nonlinear terms in the system. This compensation function is also based on bearing measurements, which guarantees that the overall controller is bearing-only. The stability of the proposed formation tracking strategy can be ensured by Lyapunov techniques. Moreover, we analyze the performance of the protocol for moving leaders, where the formation tracking error can be restricted in a bounded set. Finally, the simulation results are presented to validate the feasibility of the proposed algorithm for both fixed and moving leaders.