Decentralized Control of Cooperative Robotic Systems for Arbitrary Setpoint Tracking while Avoiding Collisions

Decentralized control strategies for multi-robot systems have been extensively studied in the literature, with the aim of regulating the overall state of the system to some desired configuration. Recently a few works have appeared that propose methodologies for solving more complex problems: in particular, partitioning of the multi-robot system into two subgroups can be exploited for cooperatively tracking arbitrarily defined setpoint functions. Specifically, a small number of independent robots can be exploited for controlling the overall state of the dependent robots. Based on this formulation, in this paper we exploit the null space based behavioral approach to obtain setpoint tracking for a multi-robot system, while avoiding inter-robot collisions.