Experimental validation of multi-vehicle coordination strategies

Consequent to previously published theoretical work by Marshall, Broucke, and Francis, this paper summarizes the apparatus and results of multi-vehicle coordination experiments conducted at the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies. These experiments successfully demonstrated the practicality of cyclic pursuit as a distributed control strategy for multiple wheeled-vehicle systems. Moreover, the pursuit-based coordination algorithm was found to be surprisingly robust in the presence of unmodelled dynamics and delays due to sensing and information processing.