  In real-world object manipulation scenarios, multiple mobile manipulator
systems may suffer from disturbances and asynchrony, leading to excessive
interaction forces and causing object damage or emergency stops. This paper
presents a novel distributed motion control approach aimed at reducing these
unnecessary interaction forces. The control strategy only utilizes force
information without the need for global position and velocity information.
Disturbances are corrected through compensatory movements of the manipulators.
Besides, the asymmetric, non-uniform, and time-varying communication delays
between robots are also considered. The stability of the control law is
rigorously proven by the Lyapunov theorem. Subsequently, the efficacy of the
proposed control law is validated through simulations and experiments of
collaborative object transportation by two robots. Experimental results
demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control law in reducing
interaction forces during object manipulation.
