Passivity preserving force scaling for enhanced teleoperation of multirobot systems

In this letter, we address the problem of teleoperating a multirobot system, and we propose a methodology for letting the user teleoperate the group of robots according to some desired dynamic behavior. Specifically, we propose a novel methodology for the teleoperation of multirobot systems, where a local control action and interrobot relationships are tuned in order to reduce their effect on the force feedback perceived by the operator. The proposed methodology is developed guaranteeing preservation of the passivity property. The effectiveness of the proposed teleoperation scheme is validated experimentally, on real robots and in a virtual reality environment.