Pose consensus based on dual quaternion algebra with application to decentralized formation control of mobile manipulators

TL;DR

This paper introduces a dual quaternion algebra-based approach for pose consensus and formation control in multi-robot systems, ensuring convergence under directed graph interactions and demonstrated through simulations and real-world experiments.

Contribution

It develops a novel dual quaternion algebra framework for pose consensus and formation control with guaranteed convergence for directed interaction graphs.

Findings

Guaranteed convergence for directed graphs with spanning trees

Effective in simulations with many agents

Successful application to real mobile manipulators

Abstract

This paper presents a solution based on dual quaternion algebra to the general problem of pose (i.e., position and orientation) consensus for systems composed of multiple rigid-bodies. The dual quaternion algebra is used to model the agents' poses and also in the distributed control laws, making the proposed technique easily applicable to time-varying formation control of general robotic systems. The proposed pose consensus protocol has guaranteed convergence when the interaction among the agents is represented by directed graphs with directed spanning trees, which is a more general result when compared to the literature on formation control. In order to illustrate the proposed pose consensus protocol and its extension to the problem of formation control, we present a numerical simulation with a large number of free-flying agents and also an application of cooperative manipulation by using real mobile manipulators.