Reduction and nonlinear controllability of symmetric distributed robotic systems with drift

Abstract

This paper considers the "reduction" problem for distributed robotic systems. In particular, the controllability of systems containing multiple instances of identical robotic systems or components where the overall system is invariant with respect to interchanging these identical robots or components is considered. The main result is a proposition which shows that for an equivalence class of symmetric systems of this type, the controllability of the entire class of systems can be determined by analyzing the smallest member of the equivalence class.