Abstract
In this paper, we focus on a control technique which has been proposed in the field of intelligent transportation systems, ITS, for vehicle platooning. This control technique, termed adaptive cruise control (ACC), is basically used for coordination of multiple mobile robots. In order for robots to move more efficiently in congested systems with bottlenecks, a robot behavior control and environmental rule proposed by the authors are appended to ACC and applied to robots. However, a robot is required to acquire position and velocity information of all the robots in the moving direction. In terms of communication, therefore we propose a simple method for organizing clusters among the preceding and following robots. Unlike the two approaches above, this method requires position and velocity information of only adjacent robots. In the simulation experiment, a limitation of ACC in congested systems with bottlenecks is shown by comparing to a result of ACC with the behavior control and environmental rule. Moreover, these results are compared to results of ACC with the clustering method. As a result, the effectiveness of the behavior control and environmental rule in conjunction with ACC is shown. And finally, the superiority of the ACC and clustering method compared to the behavior control and environmental rule for the efficient coordination is shown.
