Title: Feasibility for formation stabilization of multiple unicycles (½ hour)
Abstract: The problem of coordinated control of a group of autonomous wheeled vehicles is of recent interest in control and robotics due to the broad range of applications of multi-vehicle systems. Individual vehicles in a distributed system must be capable of collectively accomplishing tasks using only locally sensed information and little or no direct communication. Coordinated control of multi-vehicle systems includes many aspects, one of the most important and fundamental being formation control. In this talk, the feasibility problem is studied of achieving a specified formation among a group of autonomous unicycles by local distributed control. The directed graph defined by the information flow plays a key role. Necessary and sufficient conditions are presented for formation stabilization of multiple unicycles to a point and a line. A similar result is given for formation stabilization to more general geometric arrangements with the condition that a group of unicycles have a common sense of direction.