Master of Science / Department of Mechanical and Nuclear Engineering / Guoqiang Hu / In this thesis, several algorithms and experiments involving the control of robot formations are presented. The algorithms used were focused on decentralized control. The
experiments were implemented on two different experimental testbeds consisting of teams
of wheeled mobile robots. The robots used are described along with their sensors and supporting hardware. Also, there is a discussion of the programming framework used to build
the control software.
The first control algorithm and experiment uses a robust consensus tracking algorithm
to control a formation of robots to track a desired trajectory. The robots must maintain the
correct formation shape while the formation follows the trajectory. This task is complicated
by limited communication between the robots, and disturbances applied to the information
exchange. Additionally, only a subset of the robots have access to the reference trajectory.
In the second experiment, the same algorithm was re-implemented in a decentralized way,
which more effectively demonstrated the goals of the algorithm.
The second algorithm involves controlling a formation of robots without a global reference frame. In order to accomplish this, the formation description is reformulated into
variables describing the relative positions of the robots, and vision-based measurements are
used for control. A homography-based technique is used to determine the relative positions
of the robots using a single camera. Then a consensus tracking controller similar to the one
used previously is used to distribute the measured information to all of the robots. This
is done despite the fact that different parts of the information are measured by different
agents.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:KSU/oai:krex.k-state.edu:2097/8445 |
| Date | January 1900 |
| Creators | Cook, Joshua |
| Publisher | Kansas State University |
| Source Sets | K-State Research Exchange |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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