Cooperative Control Methods And Experimental Platform Design For Multi-vehicle Systems

With the prevalence of computer technology and sensor technology, multi-vehicle systems have made great progress. Compared with single vehicle, multi-vehicle systems reach better distributions on time and space; have richer functionalities and show better performance and robustness. Therefore, the research on multi-vehicle systems has fundamental significance. Based on multi-vehicle systems, cooperative control algorithms are studied and the platform of multi-vehicle cooperative control is designed and created in this thesis. The main contents of this dissertation are as follows:Firstly, this thesis introduces the model of vehicle systems, formation control and obstacle avoidance based on multi-vehicle systems. The vehicle of this thieis is a kind of wheeled mobile robots which have nonholonomic constrains, and its kinematic modeling is given. Several typical algorithms of formation control and obstacle avoidance are analyzed and summarized.Secondly, cooperative control algorithms based on multi-vehicle systems in this thesis are analyzed. In the respect of formation distributions, this thesis uses time optimization of formation as the condition of distributions. The controllers of leaders and followers are designed based on input-output feedback linearization in the leader-follower algorithm. In the respect of obstacle avoidance algorithms, the method of traditional artificial potential field(APF) is improved with respect to the two issues of APF: local minimum and unreachability. The availability and correctness of cooperative control algorithms are validated by simulation results.Then, we introduce another important research in this thesis: designing and creating the platform of multi-vehicle cooperative control. The master plat and the material schemes for each subsystem of this platform are introduced. E-Puck robots are chosen as the vehicles of this thesis and improved based on requestments of this platform. Indoor vision localization system is designed and used for the localizations of several E-Puck robots. Given many merits of Wi-Fi communication, the Wi-Fi communication system is designed and used for transferring of information betweens vehicles.Finally, combining cooperative control algorithms and the platform of multi-vehicle cooperative control, the experiments of cooperative control algorithms on the platform of multi-vehicle cooperative control are accomplished. The availability and feasibility are validated by results of experiments...