Experimental validation of collective circular motion for nonholonomic multi-vehicle systems

This paper presents the experimental validation of a recently proposed decentralized control law, for the collective circular motion of a team of nonholonomic vehicles about a virtual reference beacon. The considered control strategy ensures global asymptotic stability in the single-vehicle case and local asymptotic stability in the multi-vehicle scenario. The main contribution of this work is to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm in the presence of a number of uncertainty sources naturally arising in a real-world environment. Both static and moving reference beacons are considered, in a low-cost experimental framework based on the LEGO MINDSTORMS technology. The adopted setup features good scalability and is versatile enough to be adopted for the evaluation of different control strategies. At the same time, it represents a challenging testbed, exhibiting several issues that have to be faced in real-world applications.