A Distributed Reconfigurable Control Law for Escorting and Patrolling Missions using Teams of Unicycles

Recent years have seen rapidly growing interest in the development of networks of vehicles for which adaptive cooperation and autonomous execution become a necessity. In the paper, we develop a distributed reconfigurable control law to distribute unicycle-type vehicles evenly on a circle surrounding a moving target for the escorting and patrolling missions. The even distribution of the vehicles provides the best overall coverage of the target in its surroundings. It is shown that as the target moves, the group formation moves and rotates around the target to keep the target around the formation centroid. When some vehicles in the group are lost due to faults, the remaining vehicles recognize the loss and adaptively reconfigure themselves to a new evenly distributed formation.