Cooperative Control of Ground and Aerial Vehicles

Abstract: Recent developments in the theoretical field of multi-agent systems and cooperative control have driven a growing interest towards the area of autonomous transportation, surveillance and other applications. This thesis is an attempt to close the gap between the fields of theoretical and experimental control systems. To close this gap it is essential to create a reliable software and hardware infrastructure that can be used to test the applicability and performance of the controllers developed in theory under artificial constrains. In this thesis we will present a feasible implementation of an experimental testbed, covering both the hardware and software components of it. To build this testbed and show its operability, scenarios of multi-agent systems such as platooning and surveillance were implemented using scale models of Scania trucks and quadrotors. In this thesis we study the problem starting with the theoretical analysis of the vehicle dynamics, performing simulations and finally carrying out the experiments in the testbed. The result of this thesis is a reliable and versatile testbed that can be used to perform demonstrations of multi-agent robotic systems. The core of the program is developed in LabVIEW, the wireless communication is done using NesC and TinyOS, the simulations are developed in Simulink and the Visualization Engine is written in C++. The path taken to build this testbed has proven to be successful, allowing us to control multiple vehicles simultaneously under the intuitive LabVIEW programming environment. This document serves as a guide for those who wish to carry out experiments using the infrastructure developed here or those who wish to improve upon the existing work.