Pose Consensus of Multiple Robots with Time-Delays Using Neural Networks

Abstract

Summary This paper proposes a novel control scheme based on Radial Basis Artificial Neural Network to solve the leader–follower and leaderless pose (position and orientation) consensus problems in the Special Euclidean space of dimension three ( SE (3)). The controller is designed for robot networks composed of heterogeneous (kinematically and dynamically different) and uncertain robots with variable time-delays in the interconnection. The paper derives a sufficient condition on the controller gains and the robot interconnection, and using Barbalat’s Lemma, both consensus problems are solved. The proposed approach employs the singularity-free, unit-quaternions to represent the orientation of the end-effectors in the SE (3). The significance and advantages of the proposed control scheme are that it solves the two pose consensus problems for heterogeneous robot networks considering variable time-delays in the interconnection without orientation representation singularities, and the controller does not require to know the dynamic model of the robots. The performance of the proposed controller is illustrated via simulations with a heterogeneous robot network composed of robots with 6-DoF and 7-DoF.