Experimental Validation of Distributed Cooperative Control of Multiple Mobile Robots via Local Information Exchange

In this paper, we present the experimental testing results of distributed cooperative control algorithms for multiple mobile robots with limited sensing/communication capacity and kinematic constraints. Rendezvous and formation control problems are considered, respectively. To deal with the inherent kinematic constraints with robot model, the input/output linearization via feedback is used to convert the nonlinear robot model into a linear one, and then the distributed cooperative control algorithms are designed via local information exchange among robots. Extensive experiments using Quanser's QBot2 mobile robot platforms are conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed distributed cooperative control algorithms. Specifically, the robot's onboard Kinect vision sensor is applied to solve the localization problem, and the information exchange is done through an ad-hoc peer-to-peer wireless TCP/IP connection among neighboring robots. Collision avoidance problem is also addressed based on the utilization of fuzzy logic rules.