Bearing-Only Formation Control with Pre-Specified Convergence Time

This paper considers the bearing-only formation control problem, where the control of each agent only relies on relative bearings of their neighbors. A new control law is proposed to achieve target formations in finite time. Different from the existing results, the control law is based on a timevarying scaling gain. Hence the convergence time can be arbitrarily chosen by users, and the derivative of the control input
is continuous. Furthermore, sufficient conditions are given to guarantee almost global convergence and interagent collision avoidance. Then a leader-follower control structure is proposed to achieve global convergence. By exploring the properties of the bearing Laplacian matrix, the collision avoidance and smooth control input are preserved. A multi-robot hardware platform is designed to validate the theoretical results. Both simulation and experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our design.