Dynamic Plume Tracking by Cooperative Robots

Jun Wei Wang, Yi Guo, Muhammad Fahad, Brian Bingham

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

38 Scopus citations

Abstract

This paper presents cooperative control of autonomous mobile robots to monitor and track dynamic pollutant plume propagation in m-dimensional space. The dynamics of the pollutant plume is modeled by an advection-diffusion partial differential equation (PDE), and the plume front is described by a level set with a prespecified threshold value. We solve the problem of cooperative plume tracking using two cooperating robots under formation control, one is assigned as the sensing robot and the other is assigned as the tracking robot, where the sensing robot estimates the gradient and divergence information of the entire field based on its current concentration measurement, and the tracking robot tracks the plume front and patrols on it. Rigorous convergence analysis is provided using the set stability concept. Numerical simulations of pollutant plume tracking in both two- and three-dimensional spaces demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme. This paper extends existing literature from static-level curve tracking to dynamic plume front tracking and presents a PDE-observer-based plume front tracking control design. The results are applicable to emerging environmental monitoring tasks by cooperative robots.

Original languageEnglish
Article number8607104
Pages (from-to)609-620
Number of pages12
JournalIEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics
Volume24
Issue number2
DOIs
StatePublished - Apr 2019

Keywords

  • Cooperative control
  • dynamic pollutant plume
  • mobile robots
  • partial differential equation (PDE)
  • set stability

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