Temporal Coordination among Two Vision-Guided Vehicles: A Nonlinear Dynamical Systems Approach
Cristina P, M T Romano Joao · InTech eBooks · 2008
In this article, an attractor based dynamics autonomously generated temporally discrete and coordinated movements. The task was to temporally coordinate the timed movements of two low-level vehicles, which must navigate in a simulated non-structured environment while being capable of reaching a target within a certain time independently of the environment configuration. Movement termination was entirely sensor driven and autonomous sequence generation was stably adapted to changing unreliable simulated visual sensory information. We applied autonomous differential equations to formulate two integrated dynamical architectures which act out at the heading direction and driving speed levels of each robot. Each robot velocity is controlled by a dynamical systems architecture based on previous work (Santos, 2004), which generates timed trajectories. Temporal coordination of the two robots is enabled through the coupling among these architectures. Results enable to positively answer to the two questions addressed in the introduction. The former asked if synchronization among two vehicles can be achieved when we apply temporal coordination among dofs. Results illustrate the dynamic architecture robustness and show that such a coupling tends to synchronize movement in the two robots, a tendency captured in terms of relative timing of robots movements. The later question asked if the applied approach provides a theoretically based way of tuning the movement parameters such that it is possible to account for relationships among these. Results show that the coupled dynamics enable synchronization of the robots providing an independence relatively to the specification of their individual movement parameters, such as movement time, movement extent, etc. This synchronization reduces computational requirements for determining identical movement parameters across robots.