Cyclic-Pursuit-Based Circular Formation Control of Mobile Agents with Limited Communication Ranges and Communication Delays

This article addresses the circular formation control problem of a multi-agent system moving on a circle in the presence of limited communication ranges and communication delays. To minimize the number of communication links, a novel distributed controller based on a cyclic pursuit strategy is developed in which each agent needs only its leading neighbour's information. In contrast to existing works, we propose a set of new potential functions to deal with heterogeneous communication ranges and communication delays simultaneously. A new framework based on the admissible upper bound of the formation error is established so that both connectivity maintenance and order preservation can be achieved at the same time. It is shown that the multi-agent system can be driven to the desired circular formation as time goes to infinity under the proposed controller. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method is illustrated by some simulation examples.