Remote decentralized control strategy for cooperative mobile robots

The main goal of this paper is to define, study and analyse a remote control architecture for a set of nonholonomic robotic vehicles. This project (ACCORD) 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, the control architecture, control with time delay and monitoring of the wireless network. In this paper, we propose to present the whole goal of this project including the basis experimental setup developed to validate our control algorithm. Secondly, we 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 the 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 better receiving level. Thus, it allows us to know the relative angular position of the follower pointing out the leader. By using the wireless technology as sensor instead of vision for instance, allows a longer distance of coordinated control loop between each vehicle (approx. 100 m) even if the GPS information is not available.