Distributed coordination of dynamic rigid bodies

This paper provides a design methodology to construct a set of distributed control laws for a group of rigid bodies moving in 3D space. The motion of the rigid bodies is restricted by a nonholonomic constraint that prohibits the agents from spinning around their velocity vectors. The connections between two seemingly different flocking control laws presented by Tanner et al. [1] and by Justh and Krishnaprasad [2] are studied, and it is shown that they are actually the same laws expressed in different coordinate systems. The former is expressed in the fixed world frame, whereas the latter is expressed in the moving body frame.