Group Synchronization in Coordination Tasks via Network Control Methods
Sidney Nascimento Givigi, Kléber Cabral, Peter T. Jardine · IFAC-PapersOnLine · 2020
This paper deals with the coordination problem among robots and between robots and humans using network control methods. In several applications, robots need to collaborate with humans in order to perform tasks, such as in collaborative transportation of objects, cooperative assembly of structures, or production line activities. In all these cases, the robot needs to observe the environment and take actions according to one of more other agents; human or robotic. When only one more agent is involved (dyadic interactions), the problem is relatively well studied. However, this paper focuses on when more than one other agent is involved in the collaboration. All agents are represented as part of a graph that determines their communication architecture. Network controllers are proposed for this environment and simulations show that synchronization of all agents is achieved. Furthermore, experiments show that a virtual agent is able to efficiently interact with humans and synchronize itself to their motion. To our knowledge this is the first time network control was explicitly applied to this problem.