Formation Control of Cooperative-Competitive Robot Manipulators with Inter-agent Constraints

This paper addresses the distributed formation control problem of networked robot manipulators in end-effector coordinates. We propose a distributed bipartite formation controller that guarantees collision avoidance and maximum distance maintenance for cooperative and competitive manipulators’ end-effectors. In the considered setting, two groups of manipulators are formed and reach bipartite consensus. On the other hand, the end-effectors in the same group achieve formation. We design a gradient-based control law using barrier-Lyapunov functions to ensure that the constraints on the end-effectors are satisfied. Moreover, we establish asymptotic stability of the bipartite formation manifold. Finally, we illustrate our theoretical results via numerical simulations.