Mutual and external synchronization control of multi-robot systems

In this article, we investigate the synchronization of robot manipulators group under coordinated and cooperative scheme. In cooperative schemes all agents were fully inter-connected, such that all robots have a weight on the overall dynamics. In the coordinated schemes the leader robot or the master robot establishes the synchronized action of all the slave systems. Based on emergent consensus algorithm, the proposed controller works to position synchronization of multiple robot manipulators. The control strategy is to synchronize the angular position and the velocity of each robot in the system with respect to the common desired trajectory and the angular positions and velocities of other robots. Modeled by an undirected graph, the cooperative robots network only requires local neighbor-to-neighbor information exchange between manipulators and does not assume the existence of an explicit leader in the team. However the objective in coordinated scheme is to design interconnections and feedback controllers for the slaves, such that their positions and velocities synchronize to those of the leader robot. It is assumed that network robots have the same number of joints and any configuration made possible by one in the group can be completed by each robot in the cooperative system.