Proportional and Reachable Cluster Teleoperation of a Distributed Multi-Robot System

A remote team of robots may be teleoperated by multiple users to explore unstructured environments and to tackle unforeseen emergencies therein. During a large-scale environmental search, each user may visually observe a unique hazard endangering the remote robot connected to their local robot. Therefore, each user may want to tele-drive the remote robot team to a location different than the target locations of other users. This paper resolves the possible conflicts among the multiple user commands through a distributed clustering algorithm that allocates to each user a number of remote robots proportional to the urgency of their request. A pivotal design challenge in the teleoperation context is to ensure that the remote robots allocated to each user are topologically reachable from the user's local robot within the induced communication subnetwork. The proposed design overcomes this challenge through a reachability-constrained integer linear program that modulates the interconnections of the remote robots on the fly. A comparative experiment on a platform with 2 local and 12 remote robots validates the practical efficacy of the proposed clustering algorithm.