Virtual Target Based Multi-agent Surrounding Approach

Multi-agent surrounding is a collaborative task that uses multiple agents to surround a stationary or moving target. Multi-agent surrounding has a wide range of applications, such as area monitoring of unmanned ships, environmental monitoring, and exploration of unknown environments. Existing work pay attention to the case of one-to-one surrounding of targets by agents, but there is a lack of consideration for the case where agents are not one-to-one with the target. In this paper, we propose the concept of virtual target, which is used as a mediator to realize the generic multi-agent surrounding a target. The main idea is to surround the actual target with the virtual target, while the agents surround the virtual target, where the generation of the virtual target is based on any given surrounding graph and random sampling, and the performance of the surrounding is ensured by the virtual target control algorithm and the agent controlling algorithm. The Lyapunov stability analysis and simulation results show that the proposed approach can make the virtual target fit the actual target effectively, and the agents can surround the actual target with the shape of the virtual target effectively.