Rendezvous at a desired point irrespective of agent failures

In this paper, we study the rendezvous problem for a group of autonomous robots that can be terrestrial or aerial vehicles. The robots have to simultaneously meet at a point. This problem has been addressed by several researchers during the last few years. Various decentralized strategies have been developed and analyzed that guarantees rendezvous behavior. One such strategy is the cyclic pursuit strategy applied to the holonomic agents. Unlike most of the other strategies, cyclic pursuit allows to design the controller gain such that the agents meet at a desired point. However, if an agent fails, the cyclic connection between the agents will be lost and the whole system will break unless there is a rewiring of the connection and reassignment of controller gains. This becomes a non-trivial problem if we want to maintain the rendezvous point same as before. This paper elaborates a decentralized strategy that handles the issue of agent failure in cyclic pursuit. The rewiring mechanism to establish the cyclic connection and the reassignment of the gains are discussed and simulations are presented to validate the strategy presented in this paper.