Task-space control of bilateral human-swarm interaction with constant time delay

This paper presents system framework and control algorithm that enable a human operator to simultaneously interact with a group of swarm robots in a remote environment. In this control system, several characteristics of the configuration of the swarm robots are encoded as task functions, for which a human operator can specify desired values that are conveyed to the end-effector of the master robot. Stability and tracking performance of the proposed control system are investigated in the presence of communication delays so that the swarm robots can be manipulated remotely. Moreover, the swarm robots, which perform like a redundant robotic system, can also regulate their position to achieve secondary tasks autonomously. The proposed control algorithms are validated via numerical simulations on a 3-DOF robot manipulator with a group of mobile robots.