A Passivity-Based Approach to Formation Control Using Partial Measurements of Relative Position

In this technical note, we present a framework for the formation control of dynamic vehicles in R3, using partial measurements of relative position. The proposed control scheme implements virtual mechanical couplings on the available sensor measurements, and is developed using a passivity-based design approach with considerable insight from the bondgraph modelling formalism. In particular, we present a novel passive adaptive compensation technique to estimate the unknown state information required for the key cases of range and bearing measurements. We show that the proposed architecture is locally asymptotically stable to a desired formation. The performance of the proposed controller is verified by a simulation study.