Experiments of distributed control for multiple mobile robots with limited sensing/communication capacity

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. In the proposed distributed control, the input/output linearization via feedback is used to deal with nonlinear robot model constraints, and accordingly the linear distributed control is applied based on robots' current position and information exchange with their neighbors. The information exchange is done through a strategy accommodating the local sensing/communication capability of the robot platform used in the experiments. In other words, there is no a centralized system used in the experiments for localization. Instead, images acquired by the robot's own onboard Kinect sensor are used to convert the initial positions in robots' local coordinate frames into those in a global coordinate frame. Then the position data are communicated with neighboring robots via an ad-hoc peer-to-peer wireless TCP/IP connection for execution of distributed control rules. The experiments successfully demonstrate the practical implementation of our developed cooperative control algorithms through which both rendezvous and formation control problems are addressed.