In this research, a collective control system is designed and implemented for a group of autonomous mobile robots, and experiments are carried out with three laboratory-constructed mobile robots to verify the designed control system.
The control system for the three mobile robots are modeled and designed using Petri nets. Each robot has 16 infra-red sensors. Three basic behaviors(modes) of the robots are defined, i.e., search, formation and tracking, which are determined automatically based on sensor signal by each robot.
The experiments are carried out in two steps. First, three robots are tested for the ability of determining the mode. Second, the robots are used to perform obstacle avoidance and box pushing. From the experiments, it is shown that the designed control system can handle the tasks effectively.
