Stochastic source seeking for nonholonomic vehicles

Abstract

Steering mobile robots is the first application of extremum seeking in the book. Employing the approach developed for single-input systems, steering is conducted in concentration fields with an unknown spatial distribution, and without position (GPS) measurements available. The vehicle is driven to approach a small neighborhood of the source in a manner that seems partly random, but is provably convergent in a suitable probabilistic sense. The study presented in the chapter offers an interpretation for the chemotaxis motion of bacteria, which are stochastically driven and employ only local concentration measurements and no position measurements.