Time-delay tolerant control of an omnidirectional multi-agent system for transport operations

This paper proposes a solution regarding the general consensus of a multi-agent time-delay system in order to achieve interactive and transport operations. The multi-agent system consists of a set of omni directional mobile robots equipped with vision based systems and interactive tools. It is well known that the vision-based systems and the communication between agents produce time-delays, causing stability issues for consensus and formation control. The present work deals with a high precision consensus by means of a time-delay tolerant control law. First, the mathematical model of every agent is presented. Then, this dynamic model is extended to the set of robots conforming the multi-agent system. After that, a control law, consisting of a time-delay tolerant strategy allows orientation and position consensus. The formulation of a simple algorithm for orientation and position formations for the set of robots is presented. Finally, simulation results validate the proposed control strategy and compare the results when time-delay is present in the system or not for an object transport scenario. © 2018 IEEE.

Communication and input delay; Consensus; Multi-agent system; Time-delay systems Computation theory; Control theory; Delay control systems; Robots; System theory; Time delay; Timing circuits; Communication between agents; Consensus; Control strategies; Input delays; Omnidirectional mobile robot; Time-delay systems; Transport operations; Vision based system; Multi agent systems

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