Coordinated motion for multi-robot systems under time varying communication topologies

Abstract

This paper introduces a control strategy for obtaining cooperative tracking of periodic setpoint trajectories in multi-robot systems. A heterogeneous group of robots is considered: a few independent robots are used as a control input for the system, with the aim of controlling the position of the remaining robots, namely the dependent ones. The control strategy presented in this paper explicitly considers changes in the communication topology among the robots. These changes happen as the system evolves, since robots are equipped with finite range communication devices.