Multitarget Tracking Control for Coupled Heterogeneous Inertial Agents Systems Based on Flocking Behavior

In this paper, the flocking behavior and targets consensus tracking problems of heterogeneous multiple inertial agents with limited communication ranges are investigated. Consider the inertial effect of real agents, a distributed control protocol is designed such that the agents can achieve stable group behaviors. Using the decomposition approach, the stability of a multiple inertial agents system is proved. Combining with the flocking behavior of multiple inertial agents, agents themselves are in charge of searching and choosing the target in an autonomous and individual way according to the relationship between velocities of agents and targets. An augmented distributed multiflocking method is proposed to guarantee that the multitarget consensus tracking can be reached for heterogeneous multiagent systems. It shows that the proposed control approach can not only ensure local flocking with pursuing agents, but also make heterogeneous agents consistently track the multitarget.