Circle formation for anonymous mobile robots with order preservation

This paper proposes a distributed control law fora group of mobile robots to form any given formation on a circleof a prescribed radius. The robots are modeled by point masseswith the constraint that all of them can move only on the circle.In particular, robots are oblivious, anonymous, and unable tocommunicate directly; they share the common knowledge ofthe orientation of the circle, and can only measure the relativeangular positions of their neighbors. A sampled-data controllaw is proposed as well. For both cases, theoretical analysisand numerical simulations are given to show the effectivenessof the proposed formation control strategies with the desiredproperty of order preservatio