Disturbance observer based boundary tracking for environment monitoring

This paper presents a boundary tracking control of an agent. To this end, it is shown that the boundary tracking problem can be reformulated into a robust control of uncertain double integrator first. Then, a disturbance observer (DOB) based control is proposed solving the robust control problem. Unlike the existing results in the literature, the proposed DOB based control requires only the local position measurement of the boundary (not the gradient information). The performance of the proposed control is demonstrated for two cases: the measurement of the boundary is given in a continuous or discrete manner. Finally, it is shown that the proposed control can be used for environmental monitoring as well by showing that the agent follows a level curve of real environmental monitoring data.