Michigan's first commercial oil field was discovered at Port Huron, St. Clair County, in 1886. By 1910, 21 shallow wells had been completed in the Dundee formation at depths of about 500 to 650 feet. In 1910 the daily production from this field amounted to about 10 barrels of oil per day, all of which was used locally in the manufacture of lubricants. However, it was not until 1925 when the Sag...

A set of structural cohesiveness issues raised in control of autonomous multi-vehicle formations is analysed, using a recently developed theoretical framework of graph rigidity and persistence. The general characteristics of rigid and persistent formations and some operational criteria to check the rigidity and persistence of a given formation from the aspect of their use in cohesive motion of ...

We study the problem of achieving global behavior in a group of distributed robots using only local sensing and minimal communication, in the context of formations. The goal is to have N mobile robots establish and maintain some predetermined geometric shape. We report results from extensive simulation experiments, and 40+ experiments with four physical robots, showing the viability of our appr...

One important task in cooperative robotics is the self–organization of robotic chain formations in unknown environments. Surveillance and reconnaissance in sewers, ducts, tunnels, caves or narrow passageways, in general, are some of the applications for this type of formation. In Hettiarachchi et al. (2008) we provided simulation results for a novel chain formation algorithm that addresses this...

Even since pioneering work of Levine and Athans and Melzer and Kuo, control of vehicular formations has been a topic of active research. In spite of its apparent simplicity, this problem poses significant engineering challenges, and it has often inspired theoretical developments. In this article, we view vehicular formations as a particular instance of dynamical systems over networks and summar...

Most often, autonomous robots maintain group formations by using global information such as the position of the group leader or even the position of all robots inside the formation. Alternative approaches to autonomous robot formations have considered local information, which is more realistic but presents some drawbacks such as troop deformation. In this paper we perform a step forward in loca...

In this paper, a systematic way of maintaining rigidity in case of vehicle removals in formations for coordinating mobile autonomous vehicles with limited communication/sensing links is presented. The main concern is the minimal rearrangement of links in such a way that the links that have not been removed are preserved as they are, and the minimum number of new links are created in the formati...

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 ma...