Intelligent leader-follower behaviour for unmanned ground-based vehicles

In this paper an autonomous leader-follower is presented and tested in an unknown and unpredictable environment. Three different types of controller named as First principles-based proportional (P) controller, Fuzzy Logic Controller, and Model-based Predictive Controller are developed and tested in real-time to provide a smooth following behaviour. The follower used the leader's status sent by a smart phone to differentiate between obstacles and the leader and then using two types of sensor, laser and sonar, during the obstacle avoidance procedure. In order to identify the leader again out of many obstacles around, two alternative techniques are proposed using superposition of the scans collected by the laser and predicting the leader's trajectory using evolving Takagi- Sugeno (eTS). At the end, experiments are presented with a real-time mobile robot at Lancaster University.