Conducting multi-robot systems: Gestures for the passive teleoperation of multiple slaves

When teleoperating a multi-robot system it is useful to control the kind of behavior of the fleet depending on the environment it is moving in. In this paper, a novel bilateral control architecture for teleoperating a group of mobile robots is proposed. The user can command the robots both as a flexible and amorphous group and as a set of agents executing different trajectories for achieving a desired task, mimicking a conductor-orchestra paradigm. Exploiting passivity based control, we ensure a stable and safe behavior for the user. The proposed teleoperation strategy is validated by means of experiments.