Control of networked robots subject to communication delay and switching connection topology for cooperative source-seeking with collision avoidance

This paper investigates the problem of cooperative source-seeking by networked multi-robot systems subject to variable communication time delay, while all the agents keep a desired formation and avoid collision with each other during the motion. The connection between the robots is modeled by a dynamic and undirected graph, with arbitrary switching based on communication range. The proposed distributed control law which steers the agents toward the source contains a collision avoidance term, developed based on a novel potential function and a field gradient estimation term, computed from the delayed information. Synthesis conditions to adjust the controller parameters are derived in terms of linear matrix inequalities to ensure the team’s convergence to a neighborhood of the source. Finally, simulation results in MATLAB® are presented to demonstrate the efficiency and applicability of the suggested scheme.