Motion control of cooperative robotic teams through visual observation and fuzzy logic control

This paper describes the development of an integrated autonomous multirobot system, where two heterogeneous robots exhibit coordinated convoying behavior. Coordination is accomplished without any communication but by visual observation. An active perception system uses visual servoing to track the leading vehicle to determine it's heading and relative distance. A novel object tracking algorithm based on minimum noise and correlation energy (MINACE) filter is used for determining the heading of the leading robot. A fuzzy logic based real-time motion controller uses the heading to control the steering and relative distance and speed information to adjust the speed to let the trailing robot smoothly follow the leader. The performance and robustness of the convoying system has been verified in a series of extensive laboratory trials.