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

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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