The problem of circumnavigating a moving target in a three dimensional setting by a network of agents while avoiding inter-agent collisions is addressed in this paper. A distributed control strategy is proposed for the multi-agent system to achieve three objectives: reaching the target plane with predesigned orientation, circulating around the target with prescribed radius, and avoiding collisions among agents. After representing the control objectives by three potential functions, the gradient fields of which are orthogonal to each other, the control law then is developed using the gradient v...
