Distributed circumnavigation by unicycles with cyclic repelling strategies

The distributed circumnavigation problem, in which the task is to circumnavigate a target of interest by a network of autonomous agents, has many applications in security and surveillance, orbit maintenance, source seeking, etc. This paper deals with the circumnavigation problem using a team of non-holonomic unicycles. A novel distributed solution is proposed based on cyclic repelling strategies to achieve a circular motion around a target in a circular formation. This new approach considers minimum number of information flow links and local measurements only, yet a uniform distribution of unicycles rotated around the target is accomplished. The asymptotic collective behavior is analyzed based on the block diagonalization of circulant matrices by a Fourier transform. Simulation results also verify the validity of the proposed control algorithm.