Controlling Parent Systems Through Swarms Using Abstraction
This addresses the control challenge for systems like robot swarms manipulating objects, but it is incremental as it builds on existing abstraction and control methods.
The paper tackles the problem of controlling a parent system (e.g., an object) using a swarm of child systems (e.g., robots) by introducing a low-dimensional abstract state space to decouple them, and demonstrates controllers that achieve locally asymptotically stable tracking of a desired angle trajectory in simulations with various swarm types.
This study considers the control of parent-child systems where a parent system is acted on by a set of controllable child systems (i.e. a swarm). Examples of such systems include a swarm of robots pushing an object over a surface, a swarm of aerial vehicles carrying a large load, or a set of end effectors manipulating an object. In this paper, a general approach for decoupling the swarm from the parent system through a low-dimensional abstract state space is presented. The requirements of this approach are given along with how constraints on both systems propagate through the abstract state and impact the requirements of the controllers for both systems. To demonstrate, several controllers with hard state constraints are designed to track a given desired angle trajectory of a tilting plane with a swarm of robots driving on top. Both homogeneous and heterogeneous swarms of varying sizes and properties are considered to test the robustness of this architecture. The controllers are shown to be locally asymptotically stable and are demonstrated in simulation.