Connectivity-Preserving Swarm Teleoperation With A Tree Network

TL;DR

This paper presents a control strategy for swarm teleoperation that dynamically maintains network connectivity during human-guided movements by adjusting inter-robot links and damping, ensuring robust operation.

Contribution

It introduces a Lyapunov-based control law that guarantees connectivity preservation in a tree network during human-in-the-loop swarm teleoperation.

Findings

Successfully maintains swarm connectivity during teleoperation

Proven Lyapunov-based control law ensures synchronization and link preservation

Experimental results validate the effectiveness of the proposed method

Abstract

During swarm teleoperation, the human operator may threaten the distance-dependent inter-robot communications and, with them, the connectivity of the slave swarm. To prevent the harmful component of the human command from disconnecting the swarm network, this paper develops a constructive strategy to dynamically modulate the interconnections of, and the locally injected damping at, all slave robots. By Lyapunov-based set invariance analysis, the explicit law for updating that control gains has been rigorously proven to synchronize the slave swarm while preserving all interaction links in the tree network. By properly limiting the impact of the user command rather than rejecting it entirely, the proposed control law enables the human operator to guide the motion of the slave swarm to the extent to which it does not endanger the connectivity of the swarm network. Experiment results demonstrate that the proposed strategy can maintain the connectivity of the tree network during swarm teleoperation.