Connectivity-Preserving Swarm Teleoperation Over A Tree Network With Time-Varying Delays

Abstract: A teleoperated swarm must follow the unpredictable commands of its human operator while remaining connected. When the swarm communications are limited by distance and affected by delays, both the user input and the transmission delays endanger the connectivity of the swarm. This paper presents a constructive control strategy that overcomes both threats. The strategy modulates the intra-swarm couplings and the damping injected to each slave in the swarm based on a customized potential. Lyapunov-based set invariance analysis proves that the proposed explicit gain updating law limits the impact of the operator input and preserves the initial tree connectivity of a delay-free swarm. Further augmentation with stricter selection of control gains robustifies the design to time-varying delays in intra-swarm communications. The paper also establishes the input-to-state stability of a teleoperated time-delay swarm under the proposed dynamic control. Experiments validate connectivity maintenance and synchronization during time-delay swarm teleoperation with the proposed control.