Circumnavigation of an Unknown Target Using Backstepping Control Based on Range-only Measurements

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to propose a controller to force a robot to circumnavigate an unknown target with a predefined radius at a constant speed. The current distance between the robot and the target is the only measurement, considering the sensing capabilities of small robots. A range-only control law is designed based on the backstepping control method to achieve the goal. The proposed controller can guarantee global convergence with no steady-state error irrespective of the initial states of the robot, and locally exponential convergence near the equilibrium. Moreover, the determining of the control parameters is irrelevant to the initial states. The effectiveness and advantages of our approach are validated via simulations.