Source seeking using a single autonomous vehicle

In this paper, a source seeking problem is considered exploiting a single autonomous vehicle. The aim of the control scheme is to direct the vehicle to move towards the source of the considered phenomenon and to reach it, in order to determine its position. The vehicle's movement is controlled through a suboptimal sliding mode steering law. This is a gradient-free control law which exploits local measurements of the phenomenon at the vehicle's position only, in order to direct it towards the source. A numerical example is proposed and further results are obtained exploiting realistic data from the DIMES experiment.