Tracking control in multi-robot systems has always been a research hotspot, and the emerging fog/edge computing technology provides new ideas for the design of robot systems. A novel robot formation control scheme that requires no global positioning information is proposed in this article. Fog computing technology is also introduced to offload computing tasks when implementing the system. A fog node is responsible for providing wireless network and executing the tracking control program. As for the tracking control scheme, the desired tracking trajectory is calculated utilizing the speed information of the leader robot, and the real-time tracking error is obtained by vision based measurement. The trajectory tracking control is implemented by a combination of speed replay and PD-type iterative learning control method. The experimental results of our prototype system shows that the network provided by fog node can meet the needs of distributed real-time control applications. Local computing power requirement can be eased and 25% of computing energy is saved due to task offloading. The mean tracking error of the system is less than 0.05 m during field tests.
SHEN Guofeng
,
ZHOU Mingtuo
,
LI Jian
,
WANG Huajun
,
LI Kai
,
YANG Yang
. Research and design of fog computing-enabled mobile robots fleet tracking[J]. Journal of University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, 2021
, 38(4)
: 557
-566
.
DOI: 10.7523/j.issn.2095-6134.2021.04.016
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