Leaderless and leader-following consensus for networked mobile manipulators with communication delays

This paper studies leaderless and leader-following consensus problems for a network of non-holonomic mobile manipulators under time delays. Firstly, the issue of communication delays, dynamic uncertainties, and inevitable external disturbances are taken into account for leaderless consensus. In order to increase applicability, a leader-following consensus controller is developed for networked mobile manipulators to track a virtual leader. With a topology having a spanning tree, the group of mobile manipulators can achieve consensus in the task space when only a portion of the robots have access to the virtual leader. Moreover, collision avoidance and formation control are considered in the consensus problem with time-varying communication delays. Numerical examples are proposed to demonstrate the performance of the developed consensus control algorithms.