Multi-robot cooperative control for monitoring and tracking dynamic plumes

Abstract

We study robotic tracking of dynamic plume front modeled by the advection-diffusion equation in this paper. Different from existing work purely relying on gradient measurement, the transport model of pollution source is explicitly considered in tracking control design. We first study the problem using a single robot and solve the problem in an estimation and control framework. We then extend it to the multi-robot case in a nearest-neighbor communication structure, and have the robots take formation along the plume front. The distributed control is scalable to a large number of robots. Simulation results show satisfactory performances of the proposed method.