Communications in Information and Systems

Volume 11 (2011)

Number 1

Maintaining a directed, triangular formation of mobile autonomous agents

Pages: 1 – 16

DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.4310/CIS.2011.v11.n1.a1

Authors

B.D.O. Anderson (Australian National University)

M. Cao (University of Groningen)

S. Dasgupta (University of Iowa)

A.S. Morse (Yale University)

C. Yu (Australian National University)

Abstract

This paper analyzes a class of distributed control laws which encompasses and generalizes three previously considered types of control laws for maintaining a triangular formation in the plane consisting of three point-modeled, mobile autonomous agents. It is shown that the control laws considered can cause any initially non-collinear, positively-oriented {resp. negatively-oriented} three agent formation to converge exponentially fast to a desired positively-oriented {resp. negatively-oriented} triangular formation. These findings extend earlier results and provide an alternative perspective.

Published 5 November 2010