A decentralized controller-observer scheme for multi-robot weighted centroid tracking

Abstract

In this paper a decentralized controller-observer scheme for centroid tracking with a multi-robot system is presented. The key idea is to develop, for each robot, an observer of the collective system's state; each local observer is updated by only using information of the state of the robot and of its neighbors. The local observers' estimations are then used by the individual robots to cooperatively track an assigned time-varying reference for the weighted centroid. Convergence of the scheme is proven for both fixed and switching communication topologies, as well as for directed and undirected communication graphs. Numerical simulations relative to different case studies are illustrated to validate the approach.