Decentralized Global Connectivity Maintenance for Interconnected Lagrangian Systems with Communication Delays

In order to accomplish cooperative tasks, multi–robot systems are required to communicate among each other. Thus, maintaining the connectivity of the communication graph is a fundamental issue. In this paper we extend the connectivity maintenance control strategy introduced in (Sabattini et al., 2012), in order to explicitly take into account the presence of communication delays. When dealing with interconnected robotic systems, in fact, assuming instantaneous exchange of data is often unrealistic. For this reason, we provide a solution to the connectivity maintenance problem for interconnected Lagrangian dynamical agents, in the presence of communication delays.