Circumnavigation by a mobile robot using bearing measurements.

Abstract

This paper investigates the problem of steering a nonholonomic mobile robot to achieve a circular motion around a target. We propose control schemes that require only bearing measurements and deal with two types of targets: point target and disk target. Circumnavigation schemes are developed to achieve efficient encirclement of the target. We show that using the proposed control schemes, the robot can circle the target from a prescribed radius without distance measurement and avoid collision with disk target as well. The validity of the proposed control schemes is supported by experiments on an e-puck robot. I. INTRODUCTION In this paper, we address the problem of circumnavigating a target by using a nonholonomic mobile robot. Enclosing a target or an area of interest is a primary task in applications such as security and surveillance, search and rescue, orbit maintenance, source localization, etc. Autonomous mobile robots, either a single robot or a group of robots, can be deployed to perform this task. If the position of the target is known, then circumnavigation can be treated as a path following problem, i.e., designing control laws to drive the mobile robot to a circular trajectory with desired radius around the target (see (1), (2), (3) and references therein). Using path-following approach often requires that the relative position of the target is available, i.e., both the range