Control of over-redundant cooperative manipulation via sampled communication

TL;DR

This paper explores how sampled wireless communication among redundant cooperative robots can enhance disturbance rejection and reduce stress during object manipulation, with stability guarantees and experimental validation.

Contribution

It introduces a stability analysis framework for cooperative control with sampled communication and demonstrates its effectiveness through full dynamical system tests.

Findings

Communication improves disturbance rejection.

Sampled control maintains stability under realistic conditions.

Experimental results confirm theoretical benefits.

Abstract

In this work we consider the problem of mobile robots that need to manipulate/transport an object via cables or robotic arms. We consider the scenario where the number of manipulating robots is redundant, i.e. a desired object configuration can be obtained by different configurations of the robots. The objective of this work is to show that communication can be used to implement cooperative local feedback controllers in the robots to improve disturbance rejection and reduce structural stress in the object. In particular we consider the realistic scenario where measurements are sampled and transmitted over wireless, and the sampling period is comparable with the system dynamics time constants. We first propose a kinematic model which is consistent with the overall systems dynamics under high-gain control and then we provide sufficient conditions for the exponential stability and monotonic decrease of the configuration error under different norms. Finally, we test the proposed controllers on the full dynamical systems showing the benefit of local communication.