Observer-based task-space consensus of networked robotic systems: A separation approach

In this paper, we investigate the task-space consensus problem for multiple robotic systems with both the uncertain kinematics and dynamics in the case of existence of constant communication delays. We propose an observer-based adaptive control scheme to achieve the consensus objective without relying on the measurement of task-space velocities. The proposed new control scheme employs a new observer that does not rely on the joint velocity, and a new kinematic parameter adaptation law that is driven by both the observation and consensus errors, giving rise to the desirable separation property of the proposed control. By the Lyapunov-like and iBIBO-stability-based analyses, we demonstrate that the task-space positions of the robotic systems converge to the scaled weighted average of their initial values. The performance of the proposed observer-based adaptive scheme is shown by a numerical simulation.