Local Bearing-Only Distributed Formation Control with Collision Avoidance

Although bearing-only formation control has been widely studied in recent years, the existing results are usually limited by the need for the global coordinate system, communication-based information exchange, or local convergence. This paper proposes a novel sequential strategy for local bearing-only formation control, which relies solely on bearing measurements in local coordinate frames and is capable of achieving global convergence without frequent inter-agent communications. To accommodate to practical scenarios, we also consider a noisy environment and the collision avoidance problem. It is shown that the proposed formation control under noisy bearing measurements will converge to a stationary formation with a noise-dependent error from the target formation shape. Moreover, the proposed local bearing-only collision avoidance strategy endows our formation strategy collision-free under specific mild initial conditions.