Multirobot Heterogeneous Control Considering Secondary Objectives.

Area of Science:

• Robotics and Control Systems
• Multi-Agent Systems
• Artificial Intelligence

Background:

• Cooperative robotics often focuses on frequent tasks, maintaining robot system shape and orientation for common objectives.
• Existing approaches frequently overlook the potential benefits of redundancy within robotic groups.
• Controlling heterogeneous robot groups for complex tasks remains a significant challenge.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose a new control strategy for heterogeneous terrestrial robot groups.
• To enable robots to follow a path while simultaneously modifying their collective shape and orientation.
• To leverage robotic group redundancy for enhanced task performance.

Main Methods:

• Development of controllers based on linear algebra principles.
• Implementation of a control algorithm with low computational cost and high scalability.
• Analysis of controller stability and determination of control constant requirements.

Main Results:

• Experimental validation with diverse configurations and heterogeneous robots.
• Demonstration of the proposed controller's ability to manage primary path-following and secondary shape/orientation tasks.
• Graphical results confirm the expected operational performance of the control proposal.

Conclusions:

• The proposed control method effectively manages heterogeneous robot groups for dynamic path following and formation control.
• The linear algebra-based approach ensures computational efficiency and scalability.
• The controller's stability analysis provides guidelines for parameter selection, ensuring reliable operation.