This study considers the control of parent–child systems where a parent system is acted on by a set of controllable child systems (i.e., a swarm). Examples of such systems include a swarm of robots pushing an object over a surface, a swarm of aerial vehicles carrying a large load, or a set of end-effectors manipulating an object. In this paper, a general approach for decoupling the swarm from the parent system through a low-dimensional abstract state space is presented. The conditions that enable this approach are given along with how constraints on both systems propagate through the abstract state and impact the requirements of their controllers. To demonstrate, several controllers with hard state constraints are designed to track a given desired angle trajectory of a tilting plane with a swarm of robots driving on top. Both homogeneous and heterogeneous swarms of varying sizes and properties are considered to test the robustness of this architecture. The controllers are shown to be locally asymptotically stable and are demonstrated in simulation.

中文翻译：

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通过使用抽象的群控制父系统

这项研究考虑了对父子系统的控制，其中父系统由一组可控制的子系统（例如群）作用。这样的系统的示例包括一群机器人将物体推到表面上，一大群载有大负载的飞行器或一组操纵物体的末端执行器。本文提出了一种通过低维抽象状态空间将群与父系统解耦的通用方法。给出了启用此方法的条件以及两个系统上的约束如何通过抽象状态传播并影响其控制器的要求。为了证明这一点，设计了几种具有硬状态约束的控制器，以跟踪倾斜平面的给定所需角度轨迹，其中成群的机器人在顶部行驶。各种大小和属性的同构和异类群体都被认为可以测试这种体系结构的健壮性。控制器显示为局部渐近稳定，并在仿真中进行了演示。