Mobile Robot Coordinated Platooning: A Small-Scale Experimental Evaluation to Emulate Connected Vehicles

摘要

This paper presents the problem of mobile robots specialized coordinated motion, namely platooning from an experimental point of view. An experimental set-up consisting of multiple mobile robots is developed to emulate a scaled version of real life connected vehicles which will move in a platoon formation for enhanced efficiency, safety, and energy conservations. The autonomous motion of multiple robots could be coordinated through wireless communications between them and a lead robot. Different aspects and requirements of an experimental platform to accomplish this mission are discussed. A platooning scenario using our connected mobile robots is demonstrated in this paper. The efficiency of the described platform in implementing vehicle platooning strategies and the behavior of propagation error when there is no communication between robots is observed from this experiment.