Real-time platooning of mobile robots: design and implementation

The platooning is a coordination technique for teams of mobile units that aims at letting each unit to move closely to its preceding neighbour, thus forming the so-called platoon. This paper describes the design and implementation of a distributed robotics application where a team of autonomous mobile robots are coordinated to move as a platoon. The focus will be on the on-board real-time computing that allows a predictable robot's behavior. Experimental results are shown to assess the performance of the proposed platform.