Event-Triggered Connectivity Maintenance of a Teleoperated Multirobot System

Abstract

The information that the robots of a teleoperated multirobot system need to exchange to remain connected as they follow the commands of the human operator may strain their communications. To lighten their communications, this article proposes a distributed coordination strategy that relies onevent-triggered communications freed of Zeno behavior through hybrid dynamic event triggering. The proposed strategy maintains the multirobot system globally connected for increased agility in cluttered environments, and maintains the teleoperator passive for stable teleoperation. With the proposed coordination, the robots avoid collisions with obstacles and with each other, and eventually travel at the same velocity and maintain their desired spacings. Teleoperation of a simulated three-robot team illustrates the communications savings, and the connectivity maintenance and obstacle avoidance performance, of the proposed event-triggered distributed coordination controller.