Bearing-based Entrapment Control of Discrete-time Mobile Agents

This paper studies the problem of entrapping a target by mobile agents with a discrete-time system using bearing-only measurements. To locate the target without prior information of its position, a discrete-time estimator using bearing-only measurements is developed. Based on the estimation of the relative position, a controller is designed to drive the agent to entrap the target in an arbitrarily shaped orbit. We present the sufficient conditions under which the stability of the overall system is proved using LaSalle’s theorem for the discrete-time system and the iterative method. The scheme is developed fully in the discrete-time domain and the shape of entrapping orbit is arbitrary. An extension to the multi-agent system is also given. Simulations are given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.