TY - JOUR
T1 - Group Coordinated Control of Networked Mobile Robots with Applications to Object Transportation
AU - Hu, Junyan
AU - Bhowmick, Parijat
AU - Lanzon, Alexander
N1 - Funding Information:
Manuscript received December 8, 2020; revised March 24, 2021; accepted June 4, 2021. Date of publication June 29, 2021; date of current version August 13, 2021. This work was supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Under Grant number EP/R008876/1]. All research data supporting this publication are directly available within this publication. The review of this article was coordinated by Prof. Moussa Boukhnifer. (Corresponding author: Parijat Bhowmick.) The authors are with the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, The University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL, U.K. (e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]).
Publisher Copyright:
© 1967-2012 IEEE.
PY - 2021/6/29
Y1 - 2021/6/29
N2 - Inspired by the group activities of natural swarms (e.g., a flock of birds, a colony of ants, etc.), a fleet of mobile robots can be collaboratively put into work to accomplish complex real-world tasks. Depending on the nature and complexity of a problem, a multi-robot system (MRS) may need to be decomposed into several subgroups. This paper proposes a unified group coordinated control scheme for networked MRSs having multiple targets. A ‘discontinuous’ cooperative control law is first developed for a networked MRS to achieve individual subformations surrounding the assigned targets. A ‘continuous’ cooperative control protocol is then proposed to overcome the chattering phenomenon often caused by a discontinuous control action during hardware implementation. The closed-loop stability of the overall networked MRS is guaranteed via the Lyapunov theory and boundary-layer techniques. Finally, two hardware experiments (target-enclosing and object transportation) involving real mobile robots have been carried out to demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed scheme.
AB - Inspired by the group activities of natural swarms (e.g., a flock of birds, a colony of ants, etc.), a fleet of mobile robots can be collaboratively put into work to accomplish complex real-world tasks. Depending on the nature and complexity of a problem, a multi-robot system (MRS) may need to be decomposed into several subgroups. This paper proposes a unified group coordinated control scheme for networked MRSs having multiple targets. A ‘discontinuous’ cooperative control law is first developed for a networked MRS to achieve individual subformations surrounding the assigned targets. A ‘continuous’ cooperative control protocol is then proposed to overcome the chattering phenomenon often caused by a discontinuous control action during hardware implementation. The closed-loop stability of the overall networked MRS is guaranteed via the Lyapunov theory and boundary-layer techniques. Finally, two hardware experiments (target-enclosing and object transportation) involving real mobile robots have been carried out to demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed scheme.
KW - Swarm robotics
KW - group coordination
KW - multi-vehicle systems
KW - object transportation
KW - target-enclosing
U2 - 10.1109/TVT.2021.3093157
DO - 10.1109/TVT.2021.3093157
M3 - Article
SN - 0018-9545
VL - 70
SP - 8269
EP - 8274
JO - IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology
JF - IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology
IS - 8
M1 - 9468402
ER -