Experimental Validation of Consensus Algorithms for Multivehicle Cooperative Control

In this brief, consensus algorithms are experimentally implemented and validated on a mobile actuator and sensor network platform under directed, possibly switching interaction topologies to explore issues and challenges in distributed multivehicle cooperative control. Distributed consensus algorithms are applied to two target applications including rendezvous and axial alignment. In the rendezvous application, multiple mobile robots simultaneously arrive at a common a priori unknown target location determined through team negotiation. In the axial alignment application, multiple mobile robots collectively align their final positions along a line. The experimental results show the effectiveness and robustness of the consensus algorithms even in the presence of platform physical limitations, packet loss, information delay, etc. These experimental results validate the corresponding theoretical results.