@conference {2011e-RobFraSecBue, title = {Bilateral Teleoperation of Groups of UAVs with Decentralized Connectivity Maintenance}, booktitle = {2011 Robotics: Science and Systems Conference}, year = {2011}, month = {06/2011}, address = {Los Angeles, CA}, abstract = {In this paper, we present a decentralized passivity-based control strategy for the bilateral teleoperation of a fleet of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). The human operator at the master side can command the fleet motion and receive suitable force cues informative about the remote environment. By properly controlling the energy exchanged within the slave side (the UAV fleet), we guarantee that the connectivity of the fleet is preserved and we prevent inter-agent and obstacle collisions. At the same time, we allow the behavior of the UAVs to be as flexible as possible with arbitrary split and join maneuvers. The results of the paper are validated through semi-experiments.}, keywords = {Bilateral Shared Control of Mobile Robots, Connectivity maintenance, Decentralized control, Distributed algorithms, Estimation, Force feedback, Haptics, Multi-robot systems, Teleoperation}, attachments = {https://homepages.laas.fr/afranchi/robotics/sites/default/files/2011e-RobFraSecBue-preprint.pdf , https://homepages.laas.fr/afranchi/robotics/sites/default/files/2011e-RobFraSecBue-almost_preprint.pdf , https://homepages.laas.fr/afranchi/robotics/sites/default/files/2011e-RobFraSecBue.mp4}, author = {Paolo Robuffo Giordano and Antonio Franchi and Cristian Secchi and Heinrich H. B{\"u}lthoff} }