New bearing-only guidance law lets drone swarms circle targets without GPS

A new paper on arXiv presents a breakthrough in decentralized multi-vehicle control: bearing-only distributed circumnavigation for asymmetric Dubins vehicles. Unlike standard Dubins models, asymmetric Dubins vehicles have non-uniform left and right turn capabilities (e.g., a damaged aircraft can turn faster in one direction). The proposed guidance laws require no GPS or absolute positioning—only relative line-of-sight (bearing) information from a designated out-neighbor in a dynamic communication graph built via the nearest-neighbor rule.

The key innovation is that only a small subset of vehicles (leaders) know the target’s location. The rest (followers) infer trajectory corrections solely from the heading angle and line-of-sight angle of a chosen neighbor. Using Zubov’s theorem for nonlinear stability, the authors prove that these angular-speed-only control laws guarantee global asymptotic stability—meaning all vehicles converge to a circle of same radius around the target, regardless of initial positions. The approach requires no global coordination or central authority, making it robust to communication failures and bandwidth constraints.

Numerical simulations with heterogeneous teams (varying turn asymmetries) confirm the theoretical results: vehicles successfully circumnavigate the target from random initial headings, with followers catching up after brief transient. The guidance laws work even with sparse, time-varying connectivity. This work significantly advances the state of the art in multi-agent systems, bridging the gap between bearing-only control and realistic vehicle dynamics.