  During swarm teleoperation, the human operator may threaten the
distance-dependent inter-robot communications and, with them, the connectivity
of the slave swarm. To prevent the harmful component of the human command from
disconnecting the swarm network, this paper develops a constructive strategy to
dynamically modulate the interconnections of, and the locally injected damping
at, all slave robots. By Lyapunov-based set invariance analysis, the explicit
law for updating that control gains has been rigorously proven to synchronize
the slave swarm while preserving all interaction links in the tree network. By
properly limiting the impact of the user command rather than rejecting it
entirely, the proposed control law enables the human operator to guide the
motion of the slave swarm to the extent to which it does not endanger the
connectivity of the swarm network. Experiment results demonstrate that the
proposed strategy can maintain the connectivity of the tree network during
swarm teleoperation.

Optimization and Control