Passive Multiuser Teleoperation of a Multirobot System With Connectivity-Preserving Containment

摘要

A remote multirobot system (RMRS) outfitted with wireless sensors for large-scale data collection may need to be tele-driven by several human users simultaneously. The long distances between the users’ local robots and the RMRS can inject time-varying delays in their communications. This article enables such multiuser teleoperation of an RMRS through a control strategy that robustly synchronizes an RMRS with tree topology and proximity-limited one-hop communications among its robots, enables multiple users to tele-guide the RMRS and to feel the actions of the other users over time-delayed communications between the users’ local robots and the RMRS, and contains the RMRS to the stationary convex hull spanned by the local robots of all users in the steady state. A control design constrained by the connectivity of the RMRS and by the passivity of the teleoperator guarantees effective coordination, safe teleoperation, and steady-state containment. The design is a dynamic feedforward–feedback passivation strategy facilitated by a suitable decomposition of the teleoperator into interconnected subsystems. The analysis of the storage functions, and thus of the input–output relations, of all subsystems and their interconnections proves the properties of the design. Comparative experiments in a teleoperation testbed with four local and ten remote robots validate its practical efficacy.