A modular architecture for mobile robots equipped with continuous-discrete observers

Ahstract-We illustrate the design and development of a modular hardware/software system for multiple unicycle-like mobile robots localized via a set of camera modules. We describe the architecture and calibration of the hardware/software setup and then discuss two continuous-discrete observation laws for the distributed estimation of the robot positions. We show that a suitable model exploiting the onboard IMU measurements of the robots, enables obtaining an estimation error that is a cascade of two linear systems, for which we can show global exponential convergence to zero. The results are illustrated by our experimental tests.

[1]  Wen-an Zhang,et al.  Moving Horizon Estimation for Mobile Robots With Multirate Sampling , 2017, IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics.

[2]  Yuanxin Wu,et al.  On 'A Kalman Filter-Based Algorithm for IMU-Camera Calibration: Observability Analysis and Performance Evaluation' , 2013, ArXiv.

[3]  Eduardo Sontag.  Remarks on stabilization and input-to-state stability , 1989, Proceedings of the 28th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control,.

[4]  Spyros G. Tzafestas,et al.  Introduction to Mobile Robot Control , 2013 .

[5]  Eric Guizzo,et al.  Three Engineers, Hundreds of Robots, One Warehouse , 2008, IEEE Spectrum.

[6]  F. Alonge,et al.  A hybrid observer for localization of mobile vehicles with asynchronous measurements , 2019, Asian Journal of Control.

[7]  B. Anderson,et al.  Detectability and Stabilizability of Time-Varying Discrete-Time Linear Systems , 1981 .

[8]  Dan Simon,et al.  Optimal State Estimation: Kalman, H∞, and Nonlinear Approaches , 2006 .

[9]  Eduardo D. Sontag,et al.  Mathematical Control Theory: Deterministic Finite Dimensional Systems , 1990 .

[10]  Mu Fang,et al.  Adaptive Trajectory Tracking of Nonholonomic Mobile Robots Using Vision-Based Position and Velocity Estimation , 2018, IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics.

[11]  Florian Nadel,et al.  Stochastic Processes And Filtering Theory , 2016 .

[12]  Sophie Tarbouriech,et al.  Time-Varying Sampled-Data Observer With Asynchronous Measurements , 2019, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control.

[13]  Michelle Hampson.  Drone delivers human kidney: The organ was flown several kilometers by a drone without incurring damage - [News] , 2019 .

[14]  Ricardo G. Sanfelice,et al.  Hybrid Dynamical Systems: Modeling, Stability, and Robustness , 2012 .

[15]  Hugh F. Durrant-Whyte,et al.  Inertial navigation systems for mobile robots , 1995, IEEE Trans. Robotics Autom..

[16]  João Pedro Hespanha,et al.  Linear Systems Theory , 2009 .