Multirobot consensus while preserving connectivity in presence of obstacles with bounded control inputs

In the existing literatures of multirobots, it is usually assumed that the networked robots remain connected in topology during the task execution. In practice, however, it is not easy to guarantee connectivity of the networked robots in a clustered environment. Failure to maintain connectivity may decrease the performance of the networked robots or even fail the task. In this paper, we propose a multirobot motion coordination strategy that can maintain multirobot connectivity as well as guarantee obstacle avoidance. A potential function is proposed to generate bounded control inputs for networked robots. The efficiency of the proposed approach is demonstrated in both simulation and experiment performed on multirobot consensus tasks.