  A teleoperated swarm must follow the unpredictable commands of its human
operator while remaining connected. When the swarm communications are limited
by distance and affected by delays, both the user input and the transmission
delays endanger the connectivity of the swarm. This paper presents a
constructive control strategy that overcomes both threats. The strategy
modulates the intra-swarm couplings and the damping injected to each slave in
the swarm based on a customized potential. Lyapunov-based set invariance
analysis proves that the proposed explicit gain updating law limits the impact
of the operator input and preserves the initial tree connectivity of a
delay-free swarm. Further augmentation with stricter selection of control gains
robustifies the design to time-varying delays in intra-swarm communications.
The paper also establishes the input-to-state stability of a teleoperated
time-delay swarm under the proposed dynamic control. Experiments validate
connectivity maintenance and synchronization during time-delay swarm
teleoperation with the proposed control.
