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arXiv · 2512.12601

Quadratic-Programming-based Control of Multi-Robot Systems for Cooperative Object Transport

Si Wu·Zhengyan Qin·Tengfei Liu·Zhong-Ping Jiang
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Abstract

This paper investigates the control problem of steering a group of spherical mobile robots to cooperatively transport a spherical object. By controlling the movements of the robots to exert appropriate contact (pushing) forces, it is desired that the object follows a velocity command. To solve the problem, we first treat the robots' positions as virtual control inputs of the object, and propose a velocity-tracking controller based on quadratic programming (QP), enabling the robots to cooperatively generate desired contact forces while minimizing the sum of the contact-force magnitudes. Then, we design position-tracking controllers for the robots. By appropriately designing the objective function and the constraints for the QP, it is guaranteed that the QP admits a unique solution and the QP-based velocity-tracking controller is Lipschitz continuous. Finally, we consider the closed-loop system as an interconnection of two subsystems, corresponding to the velocity-tracking error of the object and the position-tracking error of the robots, and employ nonlinear small-gain techniques for stability analysis. The effectiveness of the proposed design is demonstrated through numerical simulations.

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Si Wu, Zhengyan Qin, Tengfei Liu, Zhong-Ping Jiang. 2025-12-14. Quadratic-Programming-based Control of Multi-Robot Systems for Cooperative Object Transport. https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.12601

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