Cooperative control for target-capturing task based on a cyclic pursuit strategy

This paper studies a methodology for group coordination and cooperative control of n agents to achieve a target-capturing task in 3D space. The proposed approach is based on a cyclic pursuit strategy, where agent i simply pursues agent i+1 modulo n. The distinctive features of the proposed method are as follows. First, no communication mechanism between agents is necessary and thus it is inherently a distributed control strategy. Also, it is a simple robust memoryless control scheme which has self-stability property. Finally, it guarantees a global convergence of all agents to the desired formation. Further, it is also guaranteed that no collision occurs. Simulation examples are given to illustrate the efficacy of the proposed method and the achievement of a desired pursuit pattern in 3D space.