A Third Generation Micro-vehicle Testbed for Cooperative Control and Sensing Strategies

This paper describes the third generation of an economical cooperative control testbed, last described in (Leung et al., 2007). The new testbed vehicles are improved with powerful on-board computing, upgraded and expanded on-board sensing, and enhanced wireless communication, while maintaining economic feasibility and scale. The new hardware allows for increased autonomy of each vehicle and for the implementation of new, more advanced algorithms that rely on increased computational capability. We demonstrate practical use of the testbed for algorithm validation by implementing both previous and new cooperative steering and barrier avoidance algorithms.