Extremum-Seeking Control in Constrained Source Tracing With Nonholonomic Vehicles

This paper proposes an extremum-seeking approach for source tracing problems with vehicles subjected to minimum turning radius and nonholonomic constraints. The admissible area for the vehicles is confined within boundary constraints. Extremum-seeking control with sliding mode is utilized for direction finding, and variable structure control is designed to address the constraints on vehicle kinematics and the accessible area. The controller enforces the vehicle to track an optimal trajectory determined by both the motion of the source and the boundary constraints. We present stability and performance analysis for the approach and establish an ultimate bound on the tracking error. A representative simulation example in the context of mobile wireless communication network illustrates the design of the extremum-seeking controller and demonstrates its performance in tracking the optimal trajectory.