In the first part of this thesis, the notion of pursuit is introduced by examining a system of identical linear agents in the plane. This idea is then extended to a system of wheeled vehicles, each subject to a single nonholonomic constraint, which is the principal focus of the thesis. It is revealed th at the equilibrium formations of vehicles in cyclic pursuit are generalized regular polygons, and it is exposed how the multivehicle system’s global behaviour can be shaped through appropriate controller gain assignments. The local stability of these equilibrium polygons is subsequently examined, revealing which formations are asymptotically stable. Finally, the results of multivehicle coordination experiments are reported. These experiments serve to demonstrate the practicality of the aforementioned distributed control strategy. The findings of this work not only bode well for continuing research on pursuit-based coordination techniques, but also for other cooperative control strategies employing similar local interactions.

The last part of the thesis explores how structure in the interconnection topology among individuals of a multiagent system influences symmetry in its trajectories. More specifically, it is revealed how circulant connectivity preserves cyclic group symmetries in a formation of simple planar integrators, and to what extent circulant connectivity is necessary to achieve symmetry invariance.