Consensus control of flexible joint robots with uncertain communication delays

Synchronization of networks composed by fully-actuated Lagrangian systems has received a lot of attention from the control theory community. Unfortunately, the case of networks composed by under-actuated systems of the same kind has not been deeply studied and the related literature is very reduced. The aim of this paper is to contribute towards the establishment of a control scheme for this class of networks by solving the particular case of a network composed by agents defined by Flexible-joint robots. The proposed schemes consider the presence of unknown delays in the communication channels. The usefulness of the controllers is validated through numerical simulations.

[1]  V O Bolshoy,et al.  PASSIVITY BASED DESIGN OF SYNCHRONIZING SYSTEMS , 1998 .

[2]  J. A. Fax,et al.  Graph Laplacians and Stabilization of Vehicle Formations , 2002 .

[3]  Luc Moreau,et al.  Stability of multiagent systems with time-dependent communication links , 2005, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control.

[4]  Naomi Ehrich Leonard,et al.  Stable Synchronization of Mechanical System Networks , 2008, SIAM J. Control. Optim..

[5]  Yongcan Cao,et al.  Distributed Coordination of Multi-agent Networks , 2011 .

[6]  Mark W. Spong,et al.  Passivity-Based Control of Multi-Agent Systems , 2006 .

[7]  Romeo Ortega,et al.  Euler-Lagrange systems , 1998 .

[8]  Yongcan Cao,et al.  Overview of Recent Research in Distributed Multi-agent Coordination , 2011 .

[9]  Richard M. Murray,et al.  INFORMATION FLOW AND COOPERATIVE CONTROL OF VEHICLE FORMATIONS , 2002 .

[10]  M.W. Spong,et al.  Output Synchronization of Nonlinear Systems with Time Delay in Communication , 2006, Proceedings of the 45th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control.

[11]  Bernhard Maschke,et al.  Port-Hamiltonian Dynamics on Graphs: Consensus and Coordination Control Algorithms , 2010 .

[12]  M. Areak,et al.  Passivity as a design tool for group coordination , 2006, 2006 American Control Conference.

[13]  Soon-Jo Chung,et al.  Cooperative Robot Control and Concurrent Synchronization of Lagrangian Systems , 2007, IEEE Transactions on Robotics.

[14]  Eduardo D. Sontag,et al.  Synchronization of Interconnected Systems With Applications to Biochemical Networks: An Input-Output Approach , 2009, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control.

[15]  P. Moylan,et al.  Stability criteria for large-scale systems , 1978 .

[16]  Rogelio Lozano,et al.  Global tracking controllers for flexible-joint manipulators: a comparative study , 1995, Autom..

[17]  Richard M. Murray,et al.  Consensus problems in networks of agents with switching topology and time-delays , 2004, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control.

[18]  Jun Zhao,et al.  Synchronization of Complex Dynamical Networks with Switching Topology: a Switched System Point of View , 2008 .

[19]  Ilʹi︠a︡ Izrailevich Blekhman,et al.  Synchronization in science and technology , 1988 .

[20]  Romeo Ortega,et al.  Synchronization of Networks of Nonidentical Euler-Lagrange Systems With Uncertain Parameters and Communication Delays , 2011, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control.

[21]  Tianping Chen,et al.  Consensus of Multi-Agent Systems With Unbounded Time-Varying Delays , 2010, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control.