Distributed Robust Indirect Adaptive Control for Manipulation of a Passive Object by a Group of Robotic Agents

In this work, a distributed indirect adaptive controller is designed for a group of robotic agents cooperatively manipulating a common payload. Uncertainty on the model of the manipulated object and limited actuation capabilities of the single agents can significantly impact the overall behavior of the control system. An indirect adaptive control scheme is proposed in this paper to address these shortcomings. In particular, model uncertainty and loss of effectiveness of the actuators are handled in a unifying fashion by an adaptive control architecture that preserves physical consistency of the estimated inertial parameters of the manipulated object, while simultaneously providing an anti-windup mechanism for the estimated inertial parameters against actuator saturation. The stability of the closed loop system is proven theoretically and the performance and robustness of the control system are validated by means of comparative simulations with respect to a baseline state-of-the-art controller.