Abstract
We address the problem of designing decentralized laws to control a team of general fully actuated manipulators which synchronize their movements while following the same desired trajectory. To this effect we investigate an adaptive control of an identical multiple manipulators, with unknown inertia parameters, tracking a common trajectory. It is also assumed that all the robots in the synchronization system have the same number of joints and equivalent joint work spaces, i.e. any possible configuration of a given robot in the system can be achieved by any other robot in the system. Adaptive controls are derived for group of manipulators using a consensus algorithm. This consensus algorithm is applied on the group level to estimate the time-varying group trajectory information in a distributed manner. The proposed strategy only requires local neighbor-to-neighbor information exchange between manipulators and does not assume the existence of any explicit leaders in the team. The interaction topology of a network of agents is represented using an indirected graph. The coordination strategy is to let each manipulator track its desired trajectory while synchronizing its motion with the others manipulator's motions so that differential position errors amongst robots converge to zero.