ICS-Zooids - an experimental testbed for cooperative control strategies

In this paper, we present an experimental test bench to implement various cooperative control strategies for multi-agent systems, and illustrate its use with experimental results for a source-seeking problem, where a group of small wheeled robots termed as Zooids should locate a source of a given spatial scalar field. This algorithm is implemented as a validation to demonstrate the capabilities of the test bench. We propose to achieve this by utilising an internal target-based position controller, under the assumptions of convexity of the scalar, continuous/discrete field and availability of local measurements of the field, so that agents can calculate its gradient and its Hessian. We then show in experiments, that using estimated gradients and Hessians (with data communicated from neighbours) in the presence of noisy measurements of the field strength provides satisfactory results for convex fields, under various algorithms such as Steepest Descent, Gauss-Newton, Levenberg Marquardt. These algorithms are analysed, and experimental results are discussed.

Subjects

Multi-agent systems

Embedded robotics

Autonomous robotic systems

Networked robotic system modeling

control

Networked embedded control systems

Control under communication constraints

Control under computation constraints

Formation control Source-seeking

Experimental-platform

DDC Class

600: Technik

620: Ingenieurwissenschaften

Publication version

publishedVersion

Lizenz

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Name

1-s2.0-S2405896320334005-main.pdf

Size

1.55 MB

Format

Adobe PDF

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ICS-Zooids - an experimental testbed for cooperative control strategies