Responsiveness and manipulability of formations of multi-robot networks

Abstract

This paper unifies the previously defined instantaneous measures of responsiveness in multi-agent systems, namely those of stiffness and manipulability. These concepts are used for characterizing how a networked multi-agent system responds to perturbation of agents or to exogenous movements of its leader nodes. The resulting unified notion of a system's responsiveness provides us with a precise characterization of the effect of different choices of leader nodes and interaction topologies have on how easy or hard it is to control the network.