Exploiting physical dynamics for concurrent control of a mobile robot

Abstract

Conventionally, mobile robots are controlled through an action selection mechanism (ASM) that chooses among multiple proposed actions. This choice can be made in a variety of ways, and ASMs have been developed that demonstrate many of them, from strict priority schemes to voting systems. We take a different approach, which we call concurrent control. Abandoning explicit action selection, we rely instead on the physical dynamics of the robot's actuators to achieve robust control. We claim that with many noisy controllers and no arbitration among commands we can elicit stable predictable behavior from a mobile robot. Specifically, we concern ourselves with the problem of driving a single planar mobile robot with multiple controlling agents that are concurrently sending commands directly to the robot's wheel motors. We state analytically conditions necessary for our concurrent control approach to be viable, and verify empirically its general effectiveness and robustness to error through experiments with a physical robot.