Formation Control Of Autonomous Robots - Achieving irregular formations from an emergence-oriented approach

Sammanfattning

The paper studies the classical cyclic pursuit problem for unicycles and aims to produce circular formations with prescribed radius and bearings for selected agents. To this end, an existing controller for regular circular formations is integrated with a proposed controller that regulates the desired bearings of selected agents as well as the formation radius. The resulting closed-loop system is analyzed via local linearization to study the stability of its equilibria. In contrast to the case where the existing controller alone yields only regular circular formations, the integration with the proposed controller enables irregular circular formations, as numerical simulations indicate that the linearized systems at the corresponding equilibria possess eigenvalues consistent with local stability. Finally, an iterative algorithm is proposed to find the best possible equilibrium with the most favorable eigenvalue configuration, and the associated region of attraction is investigated under perturbations of different magnitude.