Abstract
This report presents a formation control method for personal vehicles with two independent drive wheels and with a base for a standing human driver. Drivers on the base are allowed to control forward and backward vehicle movement by changing their COG. The proposed method assists a driver in steering the vehicle for the purpose of sustaining formations. Our approach builds formations firstly by making pairs of vehicles running side by side (C-mode) and then by connecting those pairs sequentially in a traveling direction (F-mode). During C-mode, the drivers on a pair of vehicles can enjoy conversations. A pair consists of a master and a slave. A slave obtains both relative position and relative direction from its master by applying ICP algorithm to LRF data; every vehicle is equipped with a LRF and is able to exchange LRF data taken in a shared environment. A slave can track its master other than in road environments. In our formulation, a formation is generated by individual vehicles in accordance with distributed control while the whole group is guided by a single leader under centralized control. Our experimental results show that ICP performance does not degrade even if ICP is applied in a congested formation where vehicles are separated by a small inter-vehicle distance. In a demonstration, two slave vehicles with drivers were able to steer themselves successfully in the direction of a leader vehicle. Those are the first results about application of formation control to a group of personal vehicles.
