Cyclic Pursuit of mobile robots: A linear approach

Cyclic Pursuit is a distributed control law wherein competitive or non-cooperative local interactions among agents are used to achieve cooperative global behaviors. Due to their inherent nonlinear dynamics, unicycle models are widely used in designing cyclic pursuit control laws for mobile robots. This paper introduces a simplified technique for design of linear, distributed control laws for achieving cyclic pursuit among a group of differential drive mobile robots. The control laws discussed in this paper can be used to design simple yet fully functional cyclic pursuit algorithms. The efficacy of these linear control laws for mobile robots featuring nonlinear dynamics was verified through V-REP simulations.