The study on multi-robot systems attracts much attention recently due to its potential applications in environment monitoring, search and rescue, and entertainment. See Fig. 12.1 for an illustration of a group of robotics. In this chapter, we study rendezvous or the so-called cooperative set aggregation problem for a group of robotics. In particular, each robot observes a convex set as its local target and the objective of the group is to reach a generalized coordinate agreement toward these target sets. We first consider the case when the communication graphs are fixed. A distributed control law is proposed based on each system’s own target sensing and information exchange with neighbors. With necessary connectivity, the generalized coordinates of multiple robotic systems are shown to achieve agreement in the intersection of all the local target sets, while generalized coordinate derivatives are driven to zero. Moreover, when communication graphs are allowed to be switching, we propose a model-dependent control algorithm and show that cooperative set aggregation is achieved when joint connectivity is guaranteed and the intersection of local target sets is nonempty. Simulations are given to validate the theoretical results and some discussions are provided on the situation when target sets are non-convex.
QC 20220519