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Trajectory Tracking Control of Unicycle Robots with Collision Avoidance and Connectivity Maintenance

  • Mansour KarkoubEmail author
  • Gokhan Atınç
  • Dusan Stipanovic
  • Petros Voulgaris
  • Andy Hwang
Article
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Abstract

In this paper, we focus on a multiple objective control problem for unicycle robots. By utilizing the gradients of collision avoidance and connectivity potential fields in designing reference orientations, we derive control laws for unicycle robots and show that they can track reference trajectories with bounded errors, which can be made arbitrarily small, while avoiding inter-agent collisions and ensuring that the communication among the agents is maintained. Additionally, we present experimental results where we illustrate the effectiveness of our proposed control laws by implementing them on a testbed with mobile robots.

Keywords

Multi-objective control Collision avoidance Unicycle robots 
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Notes

Acknowledgment

The work presented here was made possible by NPRP grant# 5-071-2-026 from the Qatar National Research Fund. The findings achieved herein are solely the responsibility of the authors.

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© Springer Nature B.V. 2019

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Mechanical Engineering DepartmentTexas A&M University at QatarDohaQatar
  2. 2.Coordinated Science LaboratoryUniversity of IllinoisUrbana-ChampaignUSA
  3. 3.Mechanical Engineering Department, Texas A&M UniversityCollege StationTexasUSA

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