Cooperative visibility maintenance in SE(3) for multi-robot-networks with limited field-of-view sensors

Coordination of motion between multiple robots requires the robots to sense their relative poses. Common sensors depend on maintaining a line-of-sight between the sensor and the object being sensed. When the robots move relative to one another, they must coordinate their motions to ensure that these lines-of-sight are preserved. We propose a control method to preserve desired lines-of-sight in a multi-robot system where each robot has configuration space SE(3). A key feature of the control method is its ability to reject persistent bounded disturbances, enabling its use alongside additional control tasks. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the edge-preserving control in simulations involving additional input velocities that tend to break the edges.