@article {2013l-RobFraSecBue,
	title = {A Passivity-Based Decentralized Strategy for Generalized Connectivity Maintenance},
	journal = {The International Journal of Robotics Research},
	volume = {32},
	year = {2013},
	month = {03/2013},
	pages = { 299-323},
	abstract = {The design of decentralized controllers coping with the typical constraints on the inter-robot sensing/communication capabilities represents a promising direction in multi-robot research thanks to the inherent scalability and fault tolerance of these approaches. In these cases, connectivity of the underlying interaction graph plays a fundamental role: it represents a necessary condition for allowing a group or robots achieving a common task by resorting to only local information. Goal of this paper is to present a novel decentralized strategy able to enforce connectivity maintenance for a group of robots in a flexible way, that is, by granting large freedom to the group internal configuration so as to allow establishment/deletion of interaction links at anytime as long as global connectivity is preserved. A peculiar feature of our approach is that we are able to embed into a unique connectivity preserving action a large number of constraints and requirements for the group: (i) presence of specific inter-robot sensing/communication models, (ii) group requirements such as formation control, and (iii) individual requirements such as collision avoidance. This is achieved by defining a suitable global potential function of the second smallest eigenvalue λ2 of the graph Laplacian, and by computing, in a decentralized way, a gradient-like controller built on top of this potential. Simulation results obtained with a group of quadorotor UAVs and UGVs, and experimental results obtained with four quadrotor UAVs, are finally presented to thoroughly illustrate the features of our approach on a concrete case study.},
	keywords = {Bilateral Shared Control of Mobile Robots, Connectivity maintenance, Motion control of multiple robots},
	attachments = {https://homepages.laas.fr/afranchi/robotics/sites/default/files/2013l-RobFraSecBue-preprint.pdf , https://homepages.laas.fr/afranchi/robotics/sites/default/files/IJRRConn_MM_1_LQ.mp4},
	author = {Paolo Robuffo Giordano and Antonio Franchi and Cristian Secchi and Heinrich H. B{\"u}lthoff}
}
