Passivity-Based Cooperative Dynamic Control for Human-Rigid Body Networks

This paper presents passivity-based cooperative dynamic control for human-rigid body networks. In the human-rigid body network, a human operator sends a command signal to and receives visual information from only a part of the robotic group. In this setting, the proposed dynamic control scheme achieves not only pose synchronization of all mobile robots but also convergence to the reference pose that the human operator specifies. First, we derive robot dynamics of an omni-directional mobile robot through the Newton-Euler equation. Second, we design a control input to the robots with dynamics and show the passivity property of the robot system. Next, we discuss convergence analysis of the closed-loop system through the Lyapunov stability theorem and the LaSalle's invariance principle. The main advantage of the proposed method is to guarantee convergence of not only the position but also the orientation to the reference ones in the human-rigid body network. Finally, we provide simulation results and experimental results using four ground vehicles and a tablet PC to illustrate the performance of the proposed control method.