In this article, we study the dynamic resilient containment control problem for continuous-time multirobot systems (MRSs), i.e., the problem of designing a local interaction protocol that drives a set of robots, namely the followers, toward a region delimited by the positions of another set of robots, namely the leaders, under the presence of adversarial robots in the network. In our setting, all robots are anonymous, i.e., they do not recognize the identity or class of other robots. We consider as adversarial all those robots that intentionally or accidentally try to disrupt the objective of the MRS, e.g., robots that are being hijacked by a cyber–physical attack or have experienced a fault. Under specific topological conditions defined by the notion of(r,s)-robustness, our control strategy is proven to be successful in driving the followers toward the target region, namely a hypercube, in finite time. It is also proven that the followers cannot escape the moving containment area despite the persistent influence of anonymous adversarial robots. Numerical results with a team of 44 robots are provided to corroborate the theoretical findings.

In this article, we address the problem of coordinating the motion of a team of robots with limited field of view (FOV), which inducesasymmetryin their interactions. In this context, we first propose a general coordinated motion framework for multirobot systems with triangular FOV capable of guaranteeing stability under asymmetric (directed) interactions. In deriving this framework, we illustrate that asymmetry in multirobot interactions can lead to degenerate configurations for which a fully decentralized controller may be insufficient to achieve coordination. Thus, we introduce a switching control mechanism that achievesadaptive decentralization, enabling collaborative behaviors that seek support of a centralized planner for situations that are inherently unstable (degenerate). To demonstrate the generality of our framework we provide a case study involving varying team objectives, such as topology control, that the robots can achieve with limited FOV, while remaining stable. Experimental and numerical validations based on the previously discussed case study are provided to corroborate the theoretical findings

In this paper, we address the problem of optimal topology selection for stable coordination of multi-robot systems with asymmetric interactions. This problem arises naturally for multi-robot systems that interact based on sensing, e.g., with limited field of view (FOV) cameras. From our previous efforts on motion control in such settings, we have shown that not all interaction topologies yield stable coordinated motion when asymmetry exists. At the same time, not all robot-to-robot interactions are of equal quality, and thus we seek to optimize asymmetric interaction topologies subject to the constraint that the topology yields stable multi-robot motion. In this context, we formulate an optimal topology selection problem (OTSP) as a mixed integer semidefinite programming (MISDP) problem to compute optimal topologies that yield stable coordinated motion. Simulation results are provided to corroborate the effectiveness of the proposed OTSP formulation.