Pursuit formations of unicycles

  • Authors:
  • Joshua A. Marshall;Mireille E. Broucke;Bruce A. Francis

  • Affiliations:
  • MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates (MDA) Ltd., Space Missions, 9445 Airport Rd, Brampton, Ont., Canada L6S 4J3;MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates (MDA) Ltd., Space Missions, 9445 Airport Rd, Brampton, Ont., Canada L6S 4J3;MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates (MDA) Ltd., Space Missions, 9445 Airport Rd, Brampton, Ont., Canada L6S 4J3

  • Venue:
  • Automatica (Journal of IFAC)
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

In this paper, the stability of equilibrium formations for multiple unicycle systems in cyclic pursuit is studied in detail. The cyclic pursuit setup is particularly simple in that each unicycle i pursues only one other unicycle, unicycle i+1 (modulo n), where n is the number of unicycles. This research is principally motivated by the historical development of pursuit problems found in the mathematics and science literature, which dates as far back as 1732 and yet continues to be of current interest. On the other hand, it is anticipated that the analytical techniques and solutions pertaining to these problems will prove relevant to the study of multiagent systems and in cooperative control engineering.