Surrounding control in cooperative agent networks

In this paper, two surrounding control problems are proposed, where a team of followers is used to surround a team of leaders. The problems are solved under a decentralized estimation-and-control framework. Using tools from algebraic graph theory and dynamical systems theory, it is shown that the two teams, involving a team of leaders and a team of followers, preserve. some desired convergence properties, even if the geometric center of the leaders can only be obtained from estimators. A simulation example is presented to verify the validity of the derived results. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.