Remote secure decentralized control strategy for mobile robots

Abstract

The main goal of this paper is to define, study and analyze a remote control architecture for a set of non-holonomic robotic vehicles. This project gathers three laboratories and the French Army Research Office. Each of these laboratories deals with a part of this multidisciplinary project which includes coordinated control, control architecture, control with time delay and monitoring of the wireless network. In this paper, we present the whole goal of this project including the basic experimental setup developed to validate our control algorithm. We also focus on a new decentralized control strategy that uses the Leader-Follower principle. The originality of this paper stems from the use of the signal level of wireless connection as a control vector. Indeed, each vehicle is fitted with two wireless devices. One of them is equipped with a sector antenna fitted on a DC motor to track the direction of best reception. Thus, it allows us to find the relative angular position of the Follower pointing out the Leader. Using wireless technology as a sensor, instead of vision for instance, allows a longer distance of the coordinated control loop between each vehicle (approximately 100 m) even if GPS information is not available.