Pursuit formations of unicycles

In this paper, the stability of equilibrium formations for multiple unicycle systems in cyclic pursuit is studied in detail. The cyclic pursuit setup is particularly simple in that each unicycle i pursues only one other unicycle, unicycle i + 1 (modulo n), where n is the number of unicycles. This research is principally motivated by the historical development of pursuit problems found in the mathematics and science literature, which dates as far back as 1732 and yet continues to be of current interest. On the other hand, it is anticipated that the analytical techniques and solutions pertaining to these problems will prove relevant to the study of multiagent systems and in cooperative control engineering. 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.