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.