Distributed online leader selection in the bilateral teleoperation of multiple UAVs

For several applications like data collection, surveillance, search and rescue and exploration of wide areas, the use of a group of simple robots rather than a single complex robot has proven to be very effective and promising, and the problem of coordinating a group of agents has received a lot of attention over the last years. In this paper, we consider the challenge of establishing a bilateral force-feedback teleoperation channel between a human operator (the master side) and a remote multi-robot system (the slave side) where a special agent, the leader, is selected and directly controlled by the master. In particular, we study the problem of distributed online optimal leader selection, i.e., how to choose, and possibly change, the leader online in order to maximize some suitable criteria related to the tracking performance of the whole group w.r.t. the master commands. Human/hardware-in-the-loop simulation results with a group of UAVs support the theoretical claims of the paper.