Bearing-Constrained Leader-Follower Formation of Single-Integrators With Disturbance Rejection: Adaptive Variable-Structure Approaches

This article studies the problem of stabilizing a leader-follower formation specified by a set of bearing constraints while disturbed by some unknown uniformly bounded disturbances. A set of leaders are positioned at their desired positions while each follower is modeled by a single integrator with an additive time-varying disturbance. Adaptive variable-structure control laws using displacements or only bearing vectors are applied to stabilize the desired formation. Thanks to the adaptive mechanisms, the proposed control laws require neither information on the bearing Laplacian nor the directions and upper bounds of the disturbances. It is further proved that when the leaders are moving with the same bounded uniformly continuous velocity, the moving target formation can be achieved under the proposed control laws. Simulation results are provided to support the stability analysis.