Motion planning under bounded uncertainty using ensemble control

This paper considers the problem of motion planning for a nonholonomic unicycle despite uncertainty that scales both the forward speed and the turning rate by an unknown but bounded constant. We model the unicycle as an ensemble control system, show that the position of this ensemble is controllable, and derive motion planning algorithms to steer this position between a given start and goal. We apply our work to a differential-drive robot with unknown but bounded wheel radius, and validate our approach with hardware experiments.