Cooperative Formation of Self-Propelled Vehicles With Directed Communications

This brief addresses the cooperative formation of self-propelled vehicles via the phase-based steering control. When the steering control law is designed for a directed Kuramo-to-oscillator model with a pacemaker, all agents almost globally converge to either the synchronized formation or a two-cluster formation, if the following two conditions hold: 1) the augmented digraph contains a directed spanning tree and satisfies the decoupling assumption and 2) one of the strengths that influenced by the pacemaker is larger than the critical value. Cooperative formation in the case of pacemaker-free steering control may also hold under its conditions. Numerical examples illustrate the effectiveness of the derived analytical results.