A Passivity-Based Decentralized Strategy for Generalized Connectivity Maintenance

TitleA Passivity-Based Decentralized Strategy for Generalized Connectivity Maintenance
Publication TypeJournal Article
Year of Publication2013
AuthorsRobuffo Giordano, P, Franchi, A, Secchi, C, Bülthoff, HH
JournalThe International Journal of Robotics Research
Volume32
Issue3
Pagination 299-323
Date Published03/2013
KeywordsBilateral Shared Control of Mobile Robots, Connectivity maintenance, Motion control of multiple robots
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.

Citation Key2013l-RobFraSecBue
AttachmentSize
PDF icon preprint-pdf3.83 MB
File video19.79 MB

Taxonomy upgrade extras: