Distributed formation control via global orientation estimation

In this paper, we propose a novel distributed formation control strategy, which is based on the measurements of relative position of neighbors, with global orientation estimation. Since agents do not share a common reference frame, orientations of the local reference frames are not aligned with each other. The proposed strategy includes a combination of global orientation estimation and formation control law. Under the proposed strategy, the orientation of each agent is estimated in the global sense, if interaction graph has a spanning tree. With the estimated orientations of local frames, formation control strategy ensures that the formation globally exponentially converges to the desired formation.