Communication graph rigidity is a fundamental requirement in many multi robot formation control approaches. However, ensuring and maintaining a rigid communication topology becomes challenging in practice due to limited sensing ranges and dynamic operating conditions. This paper provides a method for achieving an inter robot collision free, rigid time varying communication graph, where communication links are established or broken according to limited sensing ranges, without assuming an initial rigid graph. In addition, the proposed approach guarantees the realization of a rigid graph for heterogeneous nonlinear multi robot systems. A computationally lean, distributed quadratic optimization-based controller is developed for a leader follower architecture, acquiring rigidity based on hierarchical second-order consensus among robots. Follower agents do not require global absolute positions of any agent, including their own. The proposed method is validated through both simulations and hardware experiments in a motion-capture environment, demonstrating reliable performance under the limited sensing capabilities of individual robots.
Communication-limited robots in mission-critical scenarios such as disaster inspection and search-and-rescue must make reliable onboard decisions without access to remote operators or high-capacity reasoning services. Episodic memory reuse is an attractive low-cost fallback, but…
Autonomous exploration in unknown environments is typically driven by informative frontiers, viewpoints, or trajectories, while local safety controllers avoid obstacles represented in the current map. Under finite sensing range and limited field of view, this separation can be un…
Connected and automated vehicle (CAV) platooning promises gains in energy efficiency and traffic throughput and, most critically, in safety. These safety benefits hinge on string stability, which determines how disturbances propagate along a platoon. While longitudinal string sta…
Structural damage in modular spacecraft can disrupt mechanical and communication connectivity, reducing system capability. Existing approaches rely on redundancy or preplanned reconfiguration and do not enable autonomous repair under local information and physical constraints. We…
A key limitation on the use of diffusion models in robotic planning is their inability to inherently enforce safety or dynamical constraints, which often results in physically infeasible or unsafe outputs. Hybrid approaches that employ model predictive control (MPC) to address th…
This paper presents QuadRocket, a quadrotor-based rocket prototype that provides a low-cost, low-risk platform for validating advanced thrust-vector control strategies for launch vehicle-type systems. The prototype consists of a cylindrical main body mounted on top of a quadrotor…