Bilateral Teleoperation of Multiple Mobile Agents: Coordinated Motion and Collision Avoidance

Abstract

This paper presents theoretical and experimental results on bilateral teleoperation of multiple mobile slave agents coupled to a single master robot. We first design a passifying proportional-derivative (PD) controller to enforce motion tracking and formation control of master and slave vehicles under constant, bounded communication delays. Then, we incorporate avoidance functions to guarantee collision-free transit through obstructed spaces. The unified control framework is validated by experiments with two coaxial helicopters as slave agents and a haptic device as the master robot.

Bilateral teleoperation of multiple UAVs with decentralized bearing-only formation control

“…In [3] UAV-BT is performed coupling the position of a master device to the position of the centroid of the formation. On the contrary, [5] presents a UAV-BT scheme where the position of the master device controls the velocity of the centroid.…”

“…This topic received a rapidly-increasing attention in recent years, starting from [1], [2], [3] up to [4] and [5].…”

Using Haptic Feedback in Human-Swarm Interaction

“…The studies herein replace the path following task with an environment exploration task, but the results of Son et al (2011) still apply, since haptic feedback based on obstacle avoidance is environmental information that can improve performance of the task. Other researchers have shown similar findings with small groups of robots and were also able to prove no collisions and stability with control theory (Rodríguez-Seda et al, 2010). However, as stated before all the studies above were done in the context of path following tasks, an important class of tasks in robotics, but by no means the only one.…”

Bilateral Teleoperation of Groups of UAVs with Decentralized Connectivity Maintenance

“…A lot of interest is arising in the robotics community in single mobile robot teleoperation, see, for instance, [3,11,15] for the case of a flying robot (UAV). However, the bilateral control of multiple slaves through a single master imposes challenges that are absent in the traditional single-master/single-slave systems.…”

“…In [14], a multi-master/multi-slave teleoperation system with no delay is developed and a centralized strategy for controlling the cooperative behavior of the robots is proposed. In [11], a centralized bilateral control strategy that allows to coordinate the motion between the master and the slaves under arbitrary time delay is proposed. In our view, a main limitation of this and similar approaches lies in the rigidity of the group of teleoperated robots which is not allowed, for example, to actively reshape the formation by means of autonomous split and join maneuvers.…”