Bearing-Only Formation Control With Prespecified Convergence Time

This article 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 time-varying 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 multirobot hardware platform is designed to validate the theoretical results. Both simulation and experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our design.