International Journal of Robotics Research
Control of Interactive Robotic Interfaces: A Port-Hamiltonian Approach (Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics)
Cyber Physical Systems: Design Challenges
ISORC '08 Proceedings of the 2008 11th IEEE Symposium on Object Oriented Real-Time Distributed Computing
Planning and Control of Ensembles of Robots with Non-holonomic Constraints
International Journal of Robotics Research
Brief paper: Decentralized estimation and control of graph connectivity for mobile sensor networks
Automatica (Journal of IFAC)
Passive-set-position-modulation framework for interactive robotic systems
IEEE Transactions on Robotics
Distributed Coordination Control of Multiagent Systems While Preserving Connectedness
IEEE Transactions on Robotics
Potential Fields for Maintaining Connectivity of Mobile Networks
IEEE Transactions on Robotics
Connectedness Preserving Distributed Swarm Aggregation for Multiple Kinematic Robots
IEEE Transactions on Robotics
Vision-Based Localization for Leader–Follower Formation Control
IEEE Transactions on Robotics
Multi-robot three-dimensional coverage of unknown areas
International Journal of Robotics Research
IEEE Transactions on Robotics
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The design of decentralized controllers coping with the typical constraints on the inter-robot sensing/communication capabilities represents a promising direction in multi-robot research thanks to the inherent scalability and fault tolerance of these approaches. In these cases, connectivity of the underlying interaction graph plays a fundamental role: it represents a necessary condition for allowing a group or robots to achieve a common task by resorting to only local information. The goal of this paper is to present a novel decentralized strategy able to enforce connectivity maintenance for a group of robots in a flexible way, that is, by granting large freedom to the group internal configuration so as to allow establishment/deletion of interaction links at anytime as long as global connectivity is preserved. A peculiar feature of our approach is that we are able to embed into a unique connectivity preserving action a large number of constraints and requirements for the group: (i) the presence of specific inter-robot sensing/communication models; (ii) group requirements such as formation control; and (iii) individual requirements such as collision avoidance. This is achieved by defining a suitable global potential function of the second smallest eigenvalue Î禄2 of the graph Laplacian, and by computing, in a decentralized way, a gradient-like controller built on top of this potential. Simulation results obtained with a group of quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and unmanned ground vehicles, and experimental results obtained with four quadrotor UAVs, are finally presented to thoroughly illustrate the features of our approach on a concrete case study.