Towards Bilateral Teleoperation of Multi-Robot Systems

In this paper, we discuss a novel control strategy for the bilateral teleoperation of multi-robot systems, by especially focusing on the case of Unmanned aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Two control schemes are proposed: a top-down approach to maintain a desired topology of the local robots, and a bottomup approach which allows changes of topology based on local robots interactions. In both cases, passivity of overall teleoperation system is formally guaranteed. The haptic cues fed back to the operator reflect the motion status of the multirobot team and inform him about the presence of obstacles. The proposed approaches are validated through semi-experiments.