A family of extremum seeking laws for a unicycle model with a moving target: theoretical and experimental studies

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new class of gradient-free control laws for unicycle systems to effectively track moving extremum points of time-varying cost functions, validated through simulations and experiments.

Contribution

The paper develops and experimentally verifies a novel family of extremum seeking control laws that improve tracking performance over traditional methods.

Findings

Proven ability of the control laws to track moving extremum points.

Experimental validation demonstrating improved tracking performance.

Numerical simulations supporting theoretical results.

Abstract

In this paper, we propose and practically evaluate a class of gradient-free control functions ensuring the motion of a unicycle-type system towards the extremum point of a time-varying cost function. We prove that the unicycle is able to track the extremum point, and illustrate our results by numerical simulations and experiments that show that the proposed control functions exhibit an improved tracking performance in comparison to standard extremum seeking laws based on Lie bracket approximations.