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arXiv · 2607.17007

ADMM-Based Safety-Critical Distributed NMPC for Cooperative Transportation by Quadrupedal Robots

Ruturaj S. Sambhus·Kapi Ketan Mehta·Yicheng Zeng·Kaveh Akbari Hamed
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Abstract

This paper presents a safety-critical distributed nonlinear model predictive control (DNMPC) framework for cooperative payload transportation by teams of quadrupedal robots. The proposed approach models the robotic team and the shared payload as a dynamically coupled networked system with rigid holonomic coupling constraints arising from cooperative transportation. To enable distributed real-time optimization, the centralized finite-horizon optimal control problem is decomposed into parallel local NMPC subproblems coordinated through the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). The resulting distributed framework enforces consensus over both payload-state and interaction-wrench trajectories while explicitly incorporating acceleration-level holonomic coupling constraints within the distributed predictive control formulation. Safety-critical obstacle avoidance constraints for both the robotic agents and payload are enforced using higher-order control barrier functions (HOCBFs). The framework is validated through numerical simulations with teams of two, three, and four quadrupedal robots transporting shared payloads in cluttered environments. Real-time experiments on two- and three-robot teams demonstrate safe and robust transportation under payload uncertainty and external disturbances. Compared with centralized NMPC, the proposed framework achieves up to 23% reduction in average NLP solve time while maintaining comparable closed-loop performance. Ablation studies further demonstrate robustness to communication delays and show that explicit payload-state consensus and holonomic constraints substantially improve payload tracking and distributed coordination over existing wrench-only consensus formulations.

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Ruturaj S. Sambhus, Kapi Ketan Mehta, Yicheng Zeng, Kaveh Akbari Hamed. 2026-07-18. ADMM-Based Safety-Critical Distributed NMPC for Cooperative Transportation by Quadrupedal Robots. https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.17007

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