Collective motion under beacon-referenced cyclic pursuit

Cyclic pursuit frameworks, which are built upon pursuit interactions between neighboring agents in a cycle graph, provide an efficient way to create useful global behaviors in a collective of autonomous robots. Previous work had considered cyclic pursuit with a constant bearing (CB) pursuit law, and demonstrated the existence of circling equilibria for the corresponding dynamics. In this work, we propose a beacon-referenced version of the CB pursuit law, wherein a stationary beacon provides an additional reference for the individual agents in a collective. When implemented in a cyclic framework, we show that the resulting dynamics admit relative equilibria corresponding to a circling orbit around the beacon, with the circling radius and the distribution of agents along the orbit determined by parameters of the proposed pursuit law. We also derive necessary conditions for stability of the circling equilibria, which provides a guide for parameter selection. Finally, by introducing a change of variables, we demonstrate the existence of a family of invariant manifolds related to spiraling motions around the beacon which preserve the “pure shape” of the collective, and study the reduced dynamics on a representative manifold.