Flocking formation and stabilizer of boosted cooperative control on a sphere

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to consider flocking formations of a second order dynamic system on a sphere with a Cucker-Smale type flocking operator and cooperative control. The flocking operator consists of a weighted control parameter and a natural relative velocity. The cooperative control law is given by a combination of attractive and repulsive forces. We prove that the solution to this system converges to an asymptotic spherical configuration depending on the control parameters of the cooperative control law. All possible asymptotic configurations for this system are classified and sufficient conditions for rendezvous, deployment, and local deployment, respectively, are presented. In addition, we provide several numerical simulations to confirm our analytic results. We numerically verify that the solution to this system converges to a formation flight with a nonzero constant speed if we add a boost term. The flocking operator acts as a stabilizer on the spherical cooperative control laws.