Event-Triggered Pose Synchronization in SE(3) for Cooperating Multi-Robot Teams

Consensus and synchronization are fundamental concepts for the coordination of cooperating multi-robot teams. Applications like cooperative manipulation may require not only synchronization of the position, but also of the orientation of the individual agents. The pose of the agent can be described within the special Euclidean group and common results for coordination have to be adapted. We propose a control framework for full-pose synchronization in SE(3) for a team of Euler-Lagrange agents, relying only on relative information in the absence of a global coordinate frame. The framework consists of an inner loop for feedback linearization and an outer loop for pose synchronization. The measurements are taken by external sensors and communicated to the respective agents via a common communication network. To deal with limited communication bandwidth, we propose an event-triggered update strategy for the relative measurements. Finally, the efficacy of the proposed control and triggering law is illustrated in simulations.