Distributed Control of Multirobot Systems With Global Connectivity Maintenance

This work introduces a control algorithm that, exploiting a completely decentralized estimation strategy for the algebraic connectiv- ity of the graph, ensures the connectivity maintenance property for multi– robot systems, in the presence of a generic (bounded) additional control term. This result is obtained driving the robots along the negative gradient of an appropriately defined function of the algebraic connectivity. The proposed strategy is then enhanced, with the introduction of the concept of critical robots, that is robots for which the loss of a single communi- cation link might cause the disconnection of the communication graph. Limiting the control action to critical robots will be shown to reduce the control effort introduced by the proposed connectivity maintenance control law and to mitigate its effect on the additional (desired) control term.