A control architecture for mobile robots using fusion of the output of distinct controllers

Abstract

This work proposes a new architecture for controlling the navigation of a mobile robot, which consists of fusing the output of distinct controllers through a decentralized information filter (DIF). The output of each controller is inputted to a local filter with a covariance associated to it. The lower this covariance is, the bigger the influence of the output of the corresponding controller on the fused output is. A fuzzy logic approach is proposed to qualitatively determine such covariances. It is also carried out an analysis of the stability of the proposed control architecture. A conjecture based on energy considerations is introduced, which assures that the overall control signal emerging from the fusion engine behaves well. In order to ensure the accomplishment of such conjecture, a supervisor is included in the proposed architecture. One out of several experiments using the proposed control architecture is also presented, in order to illustrate the system performance.