Experimental validation of a decentralized control law for multi-vehicle collective motion

Abstract

The paper presents the results of experimental tests carried out to validate the performance of a decentralized control law, for the collective circular motion of a team of nonholonomic vehicles. The considered control strategy ensures global asymptotic stability in the single-vehicle case and local asymptotic stability in the multi-vehicle scenario. The main purpose of this work is to verify these theoretical properties in a real-world scenario. As a side contribution, a low-cost experimental setup is presented, based on the LEGO Mindstorms technology. The setup features good scalability, it is versatile enough to be adopted for the evaluation of different control strategies, and it exhibits several issues to be faced in real- world applications.