3-D Velocity Regulation for Nonholonomic Source Seeking Without Position Measurement
This addresses a domain-specific control problem for autonomous vehicles in source-seeking applications, representing an incremental improvement over existing methods.
The paper tackles the problem of steering a nonholonomic vehicle to seek an unknown source in 3D without position measurements, proposing a velocity regulation strategy that reduces overshoots and allows the vehicle to slow down near the source, with proven local exponential convergence and simulation validation.
We consider a three-dimensional problem of steering a nonholonomic vehicle to seek an unknown source of a spatially distributed signal field without any position measurement. In the literature, there exists an extremum seeking-based strategy under a constant forward velocity and tunable pitch and yaw velocities. Obviously, the vehicle with a constant forward velocity may exhibit certain overshoots in the seeking process and can not slow down even it approaches the source. To resolve this undesired behavior, this paper proposes a regulation strategy for the forward velocity along with the pitch and yaw velocities. Under such a strategy, the vehicle slows down near the source and stays within a small area as if it comes to a full stop, and controllers for angular velocities become succinct. We prove the local exponential convergence via the averaging technique. Finally, the theoretical results are illustrated with simulations.