On Bilateral Teleoperation of Multi-agent Systems: Bearing-based Formation Tracking Control

A problem of bilateral teleoperation of a homo-geneous multi-agent system consisting of double integrator agents is considered. A subset of agents called “leaders” are directly teleoperated by a human operator to perform formation manoeuvres. The remaining agents, called “followers”, use local autonomous bearing-based control laws to achieve the desired formation and to maintain it during all bearing rigid manoeuvres. For human-in-the-loop teleoperation of the formation, a minimal set of leaders are selected based on the speed of convergence of the multi-agent system to the desired formation. Leaders are bilaterally teleoperated using a 3-DoF Novint Falcon haptic controller. A feedback from the leaders on teleoperated task is provided back to the operator through the haptic interface. Human-in-the-loop simulations using the haptic device are presented to validate the results.