VIRTUAL PASSIVITY-BASED DECENTRALIZED CONTROL OF MULTIPLE 3-WHEELED MOBILE ROBOTIC SYSTEMS VIA SYSTEM AUGMENTATION

Passive velocity field control (PVFC) was previously developed for fully mechanical systems, in which the motion task was specified by behaviors in terms of a velocity field and the closed-loop was passive with respect to the supply rate given by the environment input. However, the PVFC was only applied to a single manipulator. The proposed control law was derived geometrically and the geometric and robustness properties of the closed-loop system were also analyzed. In this paper, we propose a virtual passivity-based algorithm to apply decentralized control to multiple 3­wheeled mobile robotic systems whose subsystems are under nonholonomic constraints and convey a common rigid object in a horizontal plain. Moreover, it is shown that multiple robot systems ensure stability and the velocities of augmented systems converge to a scaled multiple of each desired velocity field for cooperative mobile robot systems. Finally, the application of proposed virtual passivity-based decentralized algorithm via system augmentation is applied to trace a circle and the simulation results is presented in order to show effectiveness for the decentralized control algorithm proposed in this research.