Synchronous Rendezvous For Periodically Orbiting Vehicles With Very-Low-Range Interactions

This paper first offers conditions under which vehicles that are orbiting along adjacent paths will rendezvous in a small neighborhood intersecting with their paths, and then presents a controller that regulates their motion characteristics over a small time window in order to robustify their synchronous rendezvous from the first occurrence of that rendezvous, forward. The assumption is that the orbiting vehicles can only interact with each other when they are in close proximity, and they are moving independently otherwise. The analysis treats a pair of agents first, and then generalizes the approach to a chain of vehicles. Simulation results are presented to corroborate the theoretical analysis.