Valeriia Chebotareva

This paper deals with the problem of autonomously driving a mobile robot to the source of an unknown planar scalar environmental field based on pointwise measurement of its value at the current location of the robot. An underactuated nonholonomic Dubins car-like robot with a bounded control range is handled. A novel bioinspired algorithm based on hybrid control paradigm is proposed and justified via mathematically rigorous results on nonlocal convergence. This algorithm assumes the use of only two field sensors and does not require measuring or estimating the field gradient. It is also shown that, in the case of an extended source represented by a curve, the proposed algorithm endows the robot with the ability to track this curve, thereby exhibiting its layout. Theoretical results are confirmed with computer simulation experiments. The proposed control law is efficient both computationally and in terms of the resulting motion.