Bilateral control of the degree of connectivity in multiple mobile-robot teleoperation

This paper presents a novel bilateral controller that allows to stably teleoperate the degree of connectivity in the mutual interaction between a remote group of mobile robots considered as the slave-side. A distributed leader-follower scheme allows the human operator to command the overall group motion. The group autonomously maintains the connectivity of the interaction graph by using a decentralized gradient descent approach applied to the Fiedler eigenvalue of a properly weighted Laplacian matrix. The degree of connectivity, and then the flexibility, of the interaction graph can be finely tuned by the human operator through an additional bilateral teleoperation channel. Passivity of the overall system is theoretically proven and extensive human/hardware in-the-loop simulations are presented to empirically validate the theoretical analysis.