Distributed control of cooperative target enclosing based on reachability and invariance analysis

The paper presents a hybrid control approach to the problem of steering a group of unicycle-type mobile robots to reach desired relative positions and orientations with respect to a specific target and other group-mates, which is referred to as the cooperative target enclosing problem. With the idea of having independent motion towards the target without inter-individual interactions in the further range and switching to coordinated motion control in the closer range to the target, reachability and invariance analysis is recalled to yield a hybrid control law using only local available information such that a group of unicycle-type mobile robots achieves a uniform circular motion around the target at equal angular distances from each other.