Time-delay Tolerant Control of an Omnidirectional Multi-agent System for Transport Operations

This paper proposes a solution regarding the general consensus of a multi-agent time-delay system in order to achieve interactive and transport operations. The multi-agent system consists of a set of omni directional mobile robots equipped with vision based systems and interactive tools. It is well known that the vision-based systems and the communication between agents produce time-delays, causing stability issues for consensus and formation control. The present work deals with a high precision consensus by means of a time-delay tolerant control law. First, the mathematical model of every agent is presented. Then, this dynamic model is extended to the set of robots conforming the multi-agent system. After that, a control law, consisting of a time-delay tolerant strategy allows orientation and position consensus. The formulation of a simple algorithm for orientation and position formations for the set of robots is presented. Finally, simulation results validate the proposed control strategy and compare the results when time-delay is present in the system or not for an object transport scenario.