Observing a Unicycle Robot with Data Rate Constraints: a Case Study

In this paper, we consider the problem of remote observation of a unicycle-type mobile robot through a data rate constrained communication channel, which can only send a limited number of bits per unit of time. The objective is to reconstruct estimates of the state of the robot at the remote location through the messages that are sent. The design of the communication protocol should ensure that the maximum observation error is bounded whilst using as few bits per unit of time as possible. An event-triggered observation scheme is developed specifically for the unicycle-type robot. This observer is tested through experiments on Turtlebots. The experiments show that the event-triggered scheme is very efficient at reducing the average number of required communications.