Constant Bearing Flocking

In this paper, we present “bearing-and-range-only” approach for a self-organized flocking, which allows the flocking alignment without the assumption of measuring agent’s velocity or orientation. This last assumption challenges the implementation with real robot, since common off-the-shelf sensors do not provide such information unless inter-agent communication is used. To overcome the above issue, we propose a flocking behavior based on the “constant bearing rule”, which is known geometrical concept commonly used for missile guidance. The proposed behavior is described by a steering law and a velocity law. In the first one, the agent tries to keep constant bearing towards the target (if informed), or towards the center of mass of the perceived neighbors (if not informed). The second law allows the agent to regulate its linear velocity to keep a minimal safety distance towards the closest agent. Together, the two laws combined realize alignment. We perform simulation experiments to evaluate the new method and we compare the results with a “range-and-bearing” state of the art method.