Passivity-based Semi-autonomous Rotational Motion Navigation for Rigid-body Networks: Stability and Human Passivity Analysis

2026-05-23

AI Summary

This work addresses the challenge of ensuring stability in human-in-the-loop rigid-body networks for attitude control on the SO(3) manifold by proposing a passivity-based semi-autonomous control framework. The approach introduces a virtual leader to couple human operators with the multi-robot system and employs a stealthy control strategy that preserves the average information fed back to the human operator. For the first time, a passivity architecture guaranteeing stability of human-in-the-loop systems is established directly on SO(3). By integrating attitude synchronization laws, human dynamics modeling, and simulation-based identification techniques, the study rigorously proves the closed-loop stability under the assumption that the human operator behaves as a passive system. Numerical simulations validate both the effectiveness of the proposed method and the passivity of the employed human model.

Abstract

This paper presents a novel passivity-based semi-autonomous attitude control framework, with a particular focus on attitude kinematics defined on the special orthogonal group $SO(3)$. While human-robot interaction facilitates the successful execution of complex tasks, ensuring stability of human-in-the-loop systems on the $SO(3)$ manifold remains a largely unsolved challenge. We first propose a new control architecture in which a multi-robot system preserves invariance of the average information fed back to the human operator through so-called stealthy control, and the human intervention is mediated through a virtual leader, which is coupled with the robots via a passivity-based attitude synchronization law. We then rigorously prove closed-loop stability of the proposed human-in-the-loop system under the assumption that the human behaves as a passive system. To support this analysis, simulation studies are conducted to identify the human operator as a dynamical system, and to examine passivity properties of the identified model.

Problem

• passivity
• human-in-the-loop
• SO(3)
• attitude control
• stability

Innovation

• passivity-based control
• SO(3)
• human-in-the-loop
• stealthy control
• attitude synchronization