DYNAMICS AND CONTROL OF A SET OF NON-HOLONOMIC ROBOTS FOR HUNTING AND COVERAGE IN UNEVEN PLANES

The aim of this article is the ancestral control of a set of 3-wheel robots with non-holonomics dynamics for hunting and covering around a moving target. Robots have mass and inertia and wheel mass has been considered in their dynamics. The output of the controller is the wheel torque and the front wheel steering torque. The saturation and filtering effects of the actuators are also considered here. The robots in the group are controlled in such a way that each robot responds with an appropriate reaction, based on the control algorithm, and the information passed down from other robots and the target (decentralized control). Moving target dynamics have been considered in such a way that it is escaping from an invader, the target has holonomics dynamics and it is assumed that the moving target has no wheels. To derive the equation of motion, Kanes dynamics procedure has been used. Robots are equipped with sensors for distance assessment, vision angle assessment and also to signal the receiver antenna. To estimate the relative positions and variables of other robot situations and targets, the Extended Kalman filter and the Extended Kalman Smoother (Extended Rauch-Tung-Striebel smoother) have been used. A controller was designed to do group maneuvers using inertia analysis and by optimizing the norm of error between desired and actual acceleration. The operation was implemented for three planes: ramp, spherical and cylindrical. The results include the hunting and coverage of the target by four invader robots, relative distance diagrams between robots and the target, their velocity and that corresponding to the robots in 3 planes, a comparison between real and estimated variables and also comparison between estimations by the Kalman filter and the Kalman smoother. Based on the results, it can be seen that due to inertia effects in robots and their non-holonomics features, the designed controller and estimator are suitable for implementing the operation to achieve reasonable results.