Section: New Results

Networked robots

The mobile robots constitute an important area of practical development for the team:

• The paper [71] presents a path planning algorithm for autonomous navigation of non-holonomic mobile robots in complex environment. The irregular contour of obstacles is represented by segments. The goal of the robot is to move towards a known target while avoiding obstacles. The velocity constraints, kinematic robot model and non-holonomic constraint are considered in the problem. The optimal path planning problem is formulated as a constrained receding horizon planning problem and the trajectory is obtained by solving an optimal control problem with constraints. Local minima are avoided by choosing intermediate objectives based on the real time environment.

• The paper [69] presents a cooperative path planning approach for the navigation of non-holonomic mobile robots in environment with obstacles. Shared information can be obtained by sharing the local information between robots, thus the trajectories can be more optimized. Visibility graph approach is used to generate a series of intermediate objectives which guarantee the robots to reach the final objective without local minima. Then the reach of intermediate objectives is ensured by the optimal path planning algorithm. The velocity constraints, kinematic constraints and non-holonomic constraints of the mobile robot are considered in the problem.

• The paper [70] presents the real-time identification of different types of non-holonomic mobile robot systems. Since the robot type is a priori unknown, the robot systems are formulated as a switched singular nonlinear system, and the problem becomes the real-time identification of the switching signal, and then the existence of the input-output functions and the distinguishability of the systems are studied.

• An intelligent PID controller ($i$-PID controller) has been applied to control the non-holonomic mobile robot with measurement disturbance in [72] . Because of the particularity of the non-holonomic systems, this paper proposes to use a switching parameter $\alpha$ in the $i$-PID controller.