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| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
| Published: |
2025
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.12601 |
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| _version_ | 1866918248759427072 |
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| author | Wu, Si Qin, Zhengyan Liu, Tengfei Jiang, Zhong-Ping |
| author_facet | Wu, Si Qin, Zhengyan Liu, Tengfei Jiang, Zhong-Ping |
| contents | This paper investigates the control problem of steering a group of spherical mobile robots to cooperatively transport a spherical object. By controlling the movements of the robots to exert appropriate contact (pushing) forces, it is desired that the object follows a velocity command. To solve the problem, we first treat the robots' positions as virtual control inputs of the object, and propose a velocity-tracking controller based on quadratic programming (QP), enabling the robots to cooperatively generate desired contact forces while minimizing the sum of the contact-force magnitudes. Then, we design position-tracking controllers for the robots. By appropriately designing the objective function and the constraints for the QP, it is guaranteed that the QP admits a unique solution and the QP-based velocity-tracking controller is Lipschitz continuous. Finally, we consider the closed-loop system as an interconnection of two subsystems, corresponding to the velocity-tracking error of the object and the position-tracking error of the robots, and employ nonlinear small-gain techniques for stability analysis. The effectiveness of the proposed design is demonstrated through numerical simulations. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_12601 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Quadratic-Programming-based Control of Multi-Robot Systems for Cooperative Object Transport Wu, Si Qin, Zhengyan Liu, Tengfei Jiang, Zhong-Ping Systems and Control This paper investigates the control problem of steering a group of spherical mobile robots to cooperatively transport a spherical object. By controlling the movements of the robots to exert appropriate contact (pushing) forces, it is desired that the object follows a velocity command. To solve the problem, we first treat the robots' positions as virtual control inputs of the object, and propose a velocity-tracking controller based on quadratic programming (QP), enabling the robots to cooperatively generate desired contact forces while minimizing the sum of the contact-force magnitudes. Then, we design position-tracking controllers for the robots. By appropriately designing the objective function and the constraints for the QP, it is guaranteed that the QP admits a unique solution and the QP-based velocity-tracking controller is Lipschitz continuous. Finally, we consider the closed-loop system as an interconnection of two subsystems, corresponding to the velocity-tracking error of the object and the position-tracking error of the robots, and employ nonlinear small-gain techniques for stability analysis. The effectiveness of the proposed design is demonstrated through numerical simulations. |
| title | Quadratic-Programming-based Control of Multi-Robot Systems for Cooperative Object Transport |
| topic | Systems and Control |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.12601 |