Vision-Based Convoy Forming for Mobile Robots

An approach is proposed to form a convoy of vehicles autonomously following a given path. Particularly, the part of the complex mobile robot guidance system related to leader-follower control process is presented in detail. The ultimate objective is to use the local vision system of mobile robotic platform to follow the moving goal as accurate as possible simultaneously keeping the constant distance from the leading robot. Then, a proper controller design is proposed together with the implementation for the Amigobot mobile robotic platform from Adept Mobile Robots Inc. A verification of the guidance system performance via navigation experiments is also presented.

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