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Motion synchronization for semi-autonomous robotic swarm with a passivity-short human operator

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Abstract

This paper investigates coordination between a human operator and robotic swarm. The objective is to guarantee human-enabled motion synchronization to desired position/velocity references. The presence of a human in the system could improve performance in completing complex missions and adaptation to changes in environment or mission goal. Although in some works the human is modeled or assumed as a passive system, this does not always hold and a systematic solution to deal with non-passive humans is still needed. To this end, this paper assumes the human operator’s process as a passivity-short system. Based on the positive feedback interconnection of passivity-short systems, we present a novel distributed control architecture interconnecting the human operator and the robotic swarm. The control goals are then proved to be achieved even in the presence of passivity shortage in the human operator. We finally demonstrate the proposed architecture through simulation studies and also implementation on an experimental testbed.

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Notes

  1. Differentiability of \(u_h\) is guaranteed by inserting a filter just after the human operator block. See Hatanaka et al. (2015a, 2017b) for more details on this issue.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the financial support from JSPS KAKENHI Grant Nos. 15H04019 and 18H01459.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Systems and Control Engineering, School of Engineering, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan

    Made Widhi Surya Atman, Junya Yamauchi & Masayuki Fujita

  2. Division of Electrical, Electronic and Information Engineering, Graduate School of Engineering, Osaka University, Osaka, Japan

    Takeshi Hatanaka

  3. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, USA

    Zhihua Qu

  4. Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

    Nikhil Chopra

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  1. Made Widhi Surya Atman
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  2. Takeshi Hatanaka
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  3. Zhihua Qu
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  4. Nikhil Chopra
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  5. Junya Yamauchi
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  6. Masayuki Fujita
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Correspondence to Made Widhi Surya Atman.

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Atman, M.W.S., Hatanaka, T., Qu, Z. et al. Motion synchronization for semi-autonomous robotic swarm with a passivity-short human operator. Int J Intell Robot Appl 2, 235–251 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41315-018-0056-8

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