DART: A Compact Platform For Autonomous Driving Research

This paper presents the design of a research platform for autonomous driving applications, the Delft's Autonomous-driving Robotic Testbed (DART). Our goal was to design a small-scale car-like robot equipped with all the hardware needed for on-board navigation and control while keeping it cost-effective and easy to replicate. To develop DART, we built on an existing off-the-shelf model and augmented its sensor suite to improve its capabilities for control and motion planning tasks. We detail the hardware setup and the system identification challenges to derive the vehicle's models. Furthermore, we present some use cases where we used DART to test different motion planning applications to show the versatility of the platform. Finally, we provide a git repository with all the details to replicate DART, complete with a simulation environment and the data used for system identification.

Rule-Based Lloyd Algorithm for Multi-Robot Motion Planning and Control with Safety and Convergence Guarantees

This paper presents a distributed rule-based Lloyd algorithm (RBL) for multi-robot motion planning and control. The main limitations of the basic Loyd-based algorithm (LB) concern deadlock issues and the failure to address dynamic constraints effectively. Our contribution is twofold. First, we show how RBL is able to provide safety and convergence to the goal region without relying on communication between robots, nor neighbors control inputs, nor synchronization between the robots. We considered both case of holonomic and non-holonomic robots with control inputs saturation. Second, we show that the Lloyd-based algorithm (without rules) can be successfully used as a safety layer for learning-based approaches, leading to non-negligible benefits. We further prove the soundness, reliability, and scalability of RBL through extensive simulations, an updated comparison with the state of the art, and experimental validations on small-scale car-like robots.