Keywords

Autonomous robots, Mobile robots, Robots -- Control systems

Abstract

This thesis mainly consists of five independent papers concerning the reactive control design of autonomous mobile robots in the context of target tracking and cooperative formation keeping with obstacle avoidance in the static/dynamic environment. Technical contents of this thesis are divided into three parts. The first part consists of the first two papers, which consider the target-tracking and obstacle avoidance in the static environment. Especially, in the static environment, a fundamental issue of reactive control design is the local minima problem(LMP) inherent in the potential field methods(PFMs). Through introducing a state-dependent planned goal, the first paper proposes a switching control strategy to tackle this problem. The control law for the planned goal is presented. When trapped into local minima, the robot can escape from local minima by following the planned goal. The proposed control law also takes into account the presence of possible saturation constraints. In addition, a time-varying continuous control law is proposed in the second paper to tackle this problem. Challenges of finding continuous control solutions of LMP are discussed and explicit design strategies are then proposed. The second part of this thesis deals with target-tracking and obstacle avoidance in the dynamic environment. In the third paper, a reactive control design is presented for omnidirectional mobile robots with limited sensor range to track targets while avoiding static and moving obstacles in a dynamically evolving environment. Towards this end, a multiiii objective control problem is formulated and control is synthesized by generating a potential field force for each objective and combining them through analysis and design. Different from standard potential field methods, the composite potential field described in this paper is time-varying and planned to account for moving obstacles and vehicle motion. In order to accommodate a larger class of mobile robots, the fourth paper proposes a reactive control design for unicycle-type mobile robots. With the relative motion among the mobile robot, targets, and obstacles being formulated in polar coordinates, kinematic control laws achieving target-tracking and obstacle avoidance are synthesized using Lyapunov based technique, and more importantly, the proposed control laws also take into account possible kinematic control saturation constraints. The third part of this thesis investigates the cooperative formation control with collision avoidance. In the fifth paper, firstly, the target tracking and collision avoidance problem for a single agent is studied. Instead of directly extending the single agent controls to the multiagents case, the single agent controls are incorporated with the cooperative control design presented in [1]. The proposed decentralized control is reactive, considers the formation feedback and changes in the communication networks. The proposed control is based on a potential field method, its inherent oscillation problem is also studied to improve group transient performance.

Notes

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Graduation Date

2010

Semester

Fall

Advisor

Qu, Zhihua

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

College

College of Engineering and Computer Science

Department

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Format

application/pdf

Identifier

CFE0003421

URL

http://purl.fcla.edu/fcla/etd/CFE0003421

Language

English

Release Date

December 2010

Length of Campus-only Access

None

Access Status

Doctoral Dissertation (Open Access)

Subjects

Dissertations, Academic -- Engineering and Computer Science, Engineering and Computer Science -- Dissertations, Academic

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