Coordinate-free Isoline Tracking in Unknown 2-D Scalar Fields

TL;DR

This paper introduces a coordinate-free PI-like control method for a sensing robot to track isolines of unknown 2-D scalar fields, effective in GPS-denied environments, validated through simulations and real data.

Contribution

It presents a novel coordinate-free control design with a sliding surface error term for isoline tracking in unknown fields, applicable to Dubins robots.

Findings

Tracking error decreases with higher proportional gain.

Error is eliminated in circular fields with non-zero integral gain.

Controller validated on UAV simulations with real PM 2.5 data.

Abstract

The isoline tracking of this work is concerned with the control design for a sensing robot to track a given isoline of an unknown 2-D scalar filed. To this end, we propose a coordinate-free controller with a simple PI-like form using only the concentration feedback for a Dubins robot, which is particularly useful in GPS-denied environments. The key idea lies in the novel design of a sliding surface based error term in the standard PI controller. Interestingly, we also prove that the tracking error can be reduced by increasing the proportion gain, and is eliminated for circular fields with a non-zero integral gain. The effectiveness of our controller is validated via simulations by using a fixed-wing UAV on the real dataset of the concentration distribution of PM 2.5 in Handan, China.