Necessary and sufficient graphical conditions for formation control of unicycles
Zhiyun Lin, B. Francis, Manfredi Maggiore · IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control · 2005
The feasibility problem is studied of achieving a specified formation among a group of autonomous unicycles by local distributed control. The directed graph defined by the information flow plays a key role. It is proved that formation stabilization to a point is feasible if and only if the sensor digraph has a globally reachable node. A similar result is given for formation stabilization to a line and to more general geometric arrangements.