Coordinated dynamic behaviors in multi-robot systems with time-varying topologies

A control strategy for the execution of coordinated complex dynamic behaviors in multi-robot systems is introduced in this paper. In particular, considering a dependent-independent robot partitioning of a multi-robot system, we introduce a methodology for controlling the independent robots in such a way that, exploiting local interaction, the dependent robots are driven to track desired periodic setpoint trajectories. The control strategy is designed taking explicitly into account variations in the interconnection topology, due to relative movements among the robots.