Passivity-Based Control of Human-Robotic Networks with Inter-Robot Communication Delays and Experimental Verification
This work addresses the problem of stable human-robot interaction in networked multi-robot systems with communication delays, which is important for applications like teleoperation and collaborative robotics.
The paper presents a passivity-based cooperative control system for human-robotic networks that handles inter-robot communication delays using scattering transformation, and validates the approach experimentally with multiple robots and a tablet, analyzing the effects of delays on human operator behavior.
In this paper, we present experimental studies on a cooperative control system for human-robotic networks with inter-robot communication delays. We first design a cooperative controller to be implemented on each robot so that their motion are synchronized to a reference motion desired by a human operator, and then point out that each robot motion ensures passivity. Inter-robot communication channels are then designed via so-called scattering transformation which is a technique to passify the delayed channel. The resulting robotic network is then connected with human operator based on passivity theory. In order to demonstrate the present control architecture, we build an experimental testbed consisting of multiple robots and a tablet. In particular, we analyze the effects of the communication delays on the human operator's behavior.