Decentralized connectivity maintenance for cooperative control of mobile robotic systems

To accomplish cooperative tasks, robotic systems are often required to communicate with each other. Thus, maintaining connectivity of the communication graph is a fundamental issue in the field of multi– robot systems. In this paper we present a completely decentralized control strategy for global connectivity maintenance of the commu- nication graph. We describe a gradient–based control strategy that exploits decentralized estimation of the algebraic connectivity. Unlike previous approaches available in the literature, the proposed control algorithm solves the global connectivity problem in a decentralized manner providing theoretical guarantees, without requiring mainte- nance of the local connectivity between robotic systems. Moreover, results obtained with simulations and experiments on real robots are described for demonstrating the efficacy of the proposed algorithm.