Cooperative pointing control of multi-agent systems with switching topologies via distributed error estimation

This paper proposes a distributed relative-position-based cooperative pointing control scheme for stationary planar multi-agent systems toward a stationary target under switching topologies. First, the proposed scheme only requires the leaders' orientation angles and relative position measurements, without relying on the agents' states in a common global coordinate frame. Then, the cooperative control problem is decoupled into cooperative target localization and local pointing control. In the proposed scheme, the cooperative target localization problem is modeled as a distributed relative position estimation system, in which the system dynamics are determined by the switching topologies and the projection matrices induced by the leaders' orientation angles. Under minimal information conditions, sufficient conditions are established to ensure the convergence of the proposed scheme by developing a novel error estimator and multiple Lyapunov functions. As a result, the generated reference orientations converge to the desired ones, and the local pointing controllers track them asymptotically. Finally, numerical simulations validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.