Cooperative Target Tracking in Elliptical Formation

This paper presents cooperative tracking of a moving target using a group of mobile robots in an elliptical formation. This result is obtained based on the balanced circular formation obtained earlier, by further applying a similarity transformation. Orientation of the elliptical formation can be specified by a design parameter. Since our control law to each agent was designed as the summation of two control components (i.e., tracking and formation), only the formation control component needs to be modified. The extension to elliptical formation is achieved for both single-integrator and double-integrator robot models. For the communication topology, the cyclic pursuit strategy is used. The effectiveness of the proposed schemes is demonstrated by simulation examples.