Second-Order Agents on Ring Digraphs

The paper addresses the problem of consensus seeking among second-order linear agents interconnected in a specific ring topology. Unlike the existing results in the field dealing with one-directional digraphs arising in various cyclic pursuit algorithms or two-directional graphs, we focus on the case where some arcs in a two-directional ring graph are dropped in a regular fashion. The derived condition for achieving consensus turns out to be independent of the number of agents in a network.Comment: 6 pages, 10 figure

Station Keeping through Beacon-referenced Cyclic Pursuit

This paper investigates a modification of cyclic constant bearing (CB) pursuit in a multi-agent system in which each agent pays attention to a neighbor and a beacon. The problem admits shape equilibria with collective circling about the beacon, with the circling radius and angular separation of agents determined by choice of parameters in the feedback law. Stability of circling shape equilibria is shown for a 2-agent system, and the results are demonstrated on a collective of mobile robots tracked by a motion capture system

Vehicle platoons through ring coupling

In this paper, a novel strategy for the control of a string of vehicles is designed. The vehicles are coupled in a unidirectional ring at the interaction level: each vehicle is influenced by the position of its immediate forward neighbor; the first vehicle in the platoon is influenced by the position of the last vehicle. Through these interactions a cooperative behavior emerges and a platoon of vehicles moving at a constant velocity with constant inter-vehicle spacings is formed. This contrasts with more traditional control schemes where an independent leader vehicle is followed by the remaining vehicles. For this control structure, stability properties are established. The concept of string stability of a platoon is discussed and applied to the ring interconnection. Design rules are presented, showing how an appropriate choice of parameter values leads to a constant spacing or constant time headway policy. Furthermore, the scheme has a characteristic property: it maintains the platoon structure when subject to malfunctioning vehicles

A Cyclic Pursuit Framework for Networked Mobile Agents Based on Vector Field Approach

This paper proposes a pursuit formation control scheme for a network of double-integrator mobile agents based on a vector field approach. In a leaderless architecture, each agent pursues another one via a cyclic topology to achieve a regular polygon formation. On the other hand, the agents are exposed to a rotational vector field such that they rotate around the vector field centroid, while they keep the regular polygon formation. The main problem of existing approaches in the literature for cyclic pursuit of double-integrator multiagent systems is that under those approaches, the swarm angular velocity and centroid are not controllable based on missions and agents capabilities. However, by employing the proposed vector field approach in this paper, while keeping a regular polygon formation, the swarm angular velocity and centroid can be determined arbitrary. The obtained results can be extended to achieve elliptical formations with cyclic pursuit as well. Simulation results for a team of eight mobile agents verify the accuracy of the proposed control scheme