Safety-critical target enclosing control for multi-robot systems: A robust reconfigurable strategy

Area of Science:

• Robotics
• Control Systems
• Fault-Tolerant Systems

Background:

• Multi-robot systems require robust control for formation maintenance and safety.
• Actuator faults and external disturbances pose significant challenges to system reliability.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a fault-tolerant target enclosing control strategy for multi-robot systems.
• To enhance system resilience against actuator failures and external disturbances.

Main Methods:

• Constructed a target enclosing framework using bearing rigidity theory.
• Designed a fixed-time disturbance observer for disturbance estimation.
• Proposed a hierarchical fault-tolerant strategy with adaptive countermeasures.
• Developed a quadratic programming-based controller with control barrier functions for safety.

Main Results:

• The proposed framework ensures formation shape is determined by inter-robot bearing measurements.
• The fault-tolerant strategy adaptively compensates for actuator constraints.
• The controller guarantees system safety, including obstacle and inter-robot collision avoidance.
• Simulations and experiments validated the algorithm's effectiveness.

Conclusions:

• The developed algorithm provides robust and reconfigurable control for multi-robot systems.
• The approach effectively handles actuator faults and external disturbances while ensuring safety.