Connectivity-Preserving Swarm Teleoperation With A Tree Network

Abstract

During swarm teleoperation, the operator may threaten the distance-dependent inter-robot communications and, with them, the connectivity of the slave swarm. To prevent the operator from disconnecting the swarm, this paper develops a constructive strategy to dynamically modulate the interconnections of, and the local damping injections at, all slave robots. Lyapunov-based set invariance analysis shows that the strategy preserves all interaction links in the tree network while synchronizing the slave swarm. By properly limiting the impact of the user command rather than rejecting it entirely, the proposed explicit gain update law enables the operator to guide the motion of the slave swarm to the extent to which it does not endanger swarm connectivity. An experiment illustrates that the proposed strategy can maintain the tree network connectivity of a teleoperated swarm.