Research paperCollective circular motion in synchronized and balanced formations with second-order rotational dynamics

•Proposed limited communication based control strategy to stabilize synchronized and balanced collective circular formations.•Considered the second-order rotational dynamics of the agent, which is adequate to control both its orientation and angular velocity.•Asymptotic stability of desired collective formations is proved using Lyapunov stability theory and LaSalle's invariance principle.•Explored some interesting symmetric formations suitable for the application to mobile sensor networks.

This paper considers collective circular motion of multi-agent systems in which all the agents are required to traverse different circles or a common circle at a prescribed angular velocity. It is required to achieve these collective motions with the heading angles of the agents synchronized or balanced. In synchronization, the agents and their centroid have a common velocity direction, while in balancing, the movement of agents causes the location of the centroid to become stationary. The agents are initially considered to move at unit speed around individual circles at different angular velocities. It is assumed that the agents are subjected to limited communication constraints, and exchange relative information according to a time-invariant undirected graph. We present suitable feedback control laws for each of these motion coordination tasks by considering a second-order rotational dynamics of the agent. Simulations are given to illustrate the theoretical findings.