Decentralized Connectivity Maintenance For Networked Lagrangian Dynamical Systems With Collision Avoidance

In order to accomplish cooperative tasks, multi‐robot systems are required to communicate among each other. This inter‐robot communication can be modeled as a graph. Thus, maintaining the connectivity of the communication graph is a fundamental issue in cooperative robotic systems. Connectivity maintenance has been extensively studied in the last few years, but generally considering only kinematic agents. In this paper we introduce a control strategy which, by exploiting a decentralized procedure for the estimation of the algebraic connectivity of the graph, ensures connectivity maintenance for groups of Lagrangian systems. Collision avoidance control actions are also integrated with the connectivity maintenance algorithm. The control strategy is validated by means of analytical proofs and simulation results.