Time-varying formation tracking with distributed multi-sensor multi-target filtering

Formation tracking is used widely in targets enclosing, monitoring, and striking; however, in practical scenes, the targets are always uncooperative. The problem of time-varying formation tracking for multi-agent with multi-target, which states are unknown is studied in this paper. In order to obtain the accurate state estimations of targets, a distributed multi-sensor multi-target filtering algorithm based on the cubature Kalman filter scheme and multiple heterogeneous sensors is proposed. Then the state estimations obtained by the filtering algorithm are adopted to design a time-varying formation tracking protocol for multi-agent, enabling multi-agent to form a time-varying formation to track the convex combination of targets. Finally, the effectiveness of this proposed algorithm is illustrated by numerical example.