A Max-Consensus Cyclic Pursuit Based Guidance Law for Simultaneous Target Interception

In this paper, we consider the problem of simultaneous interception of a stationary target by a team of pursuers. The pursuers are assumed to be heterogeneous in terms of their linear speeds and are modelled with unicycle kinematics. The proposed guidance law implements a cyclic pursuit framework where every pursuer communicates only with its neighbour in a cyclic fashion. Target interception occurs simultaneously at minimum time by achieving max-consensus in the impact times of the pursuers. In order to drive the system towards the desired behaviour, a PI controller is designed which works even in the presence of heading errors. Various scenarios are illustrated in the paper through numerical simulations to validate the theoretical results.