In this paper we validate, including experimentally, the effectiveness of a recent theoretical developments made by our group on control-affine Extremum Seeking Control (ESC) systems. In particular, our validation is concerned with the problem of source seeking by a mobile robot to the unknown source of a scalar signal (e.g., light). Our recent theoretical results made it possible to estimate the gradient of the unknown objective function (i.e., the scalar signal) incorporated in the ESC and use such information to apply an adaptation law which attenuates the oscillations of the ESC system while converging to the extremum (i.e., source). Based on our previous results, we propose here an amended design of the simple single-integrator control-affine structure known in ESC literature and show that it can functions effectively to achieve a model-free, real-time source seeking of light with attenuated oscillations using only local measurements of the light intensity. Results imply that the proposed design has significant potential as it also demonstrated much better convergence rate. We hope this paper encourages expansion of the proposed design in other fields, problems and experiments.

翻译：本文通过实验验证了我们课题组近期在控制仿射极值搜索控制（ESC）系统理论方面的有效性。具体而言，我们针对移动机器人对未知标量信号（如光强）源进行搜索的问题展开验证。我们新近的理论成果使得能够估计嵌入ESC中的未知目标函数（即标量信号）的梯度，并利用该信息设计自适应律，从而在收敛至极值点（即信号源）的同时抑制ESC系统的振荡。基于已有成果，本文提出了ESC文献中经典单积分器控制仿射结构的修正方案，并证明该方案能够通过仅利用局部光强测量值，有效实现无模型的实时光强源搜索，且具有振荡抑制特性。结果表明，该设计展现出显著优越性，其收敛速率也大幅提升。期待本文能推动该设计在其他领域、问题及实验中的推广应用。