Problem of uniform deployment on a line segment for second-order agents

Consideration was given to a special problem of controlling a formation of mobile agents, that of uniform deployment of several identical agents on a segment of the straight line. For the case of agents obeying the first-order dynamic model, this problem seems to be first formulated in 1997 by I.A. Wagner and A.M. Bruckstein as "row straightening." In the present paper, the straightening algorithm was generalized to a more interesting case where the agent dynamics obeys second-order differential equations or, stated differently, it is the agent's acceleration (or the force applied to it) that is the control.