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...

This paper considers formation shape control of a team of four point agents, for the most part in the plane. Control laws based on specified interagent distances are used. For a complete graph, specification of all interagent distances determines the formation shape uniquely. Krick, Broucke and Francis showed that for a now almost standard control law, there may exist equilibrium formation shap...

In this paper, we provide a graph theoretical framework that allows us to formally define formations of multiple vehicles and the issues arising in graph realizations and unicity and their connections to stability of formations. The notion of graph rigidity is crucial in identifying the shape variables of a formation. This eventually leads to tools for formation stabilization, tacking, and form...

Within the ICSTI Insights Series we offer three articles on the 'living publication' that is already available to practitioners in the important field of crystal structure determination and analysis. While the specific examples are drawn from this particular field, we invite readers to draw parallels in their own fields of interest. The first article describes the present state of the crystallo...

Luminol is considered as an efficient sycpstem in electrochemiluminescence (ECL) measurements for the detection of hydrogen peroxide. In this paper, new luminol imide derivatives with different alkyl substituent chains were designed and synthesized. Their gelation behaviors in 26 solvents were tested as novel low molecular mass organic gelators. It was shown that the length and number of alkyl ...

In this paper we show how non–linear attractor dynamics can be used as a framework to control teams of autonomous mobile robots that should navigate according to a predefined geometric formation. The environment does not need to be known a priori and may change over time. Implicit to the control architecture are some important features such as establishing and moving the formation, split and jo...

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...