Low-Complexity Cooperative Payload Transportation for Nonholonomic Mobile Robots Under Scalable Constraints

Abstract

Cooperative transportation, a key aspect of logistics cyber-physical systems (CPS), is typically approached using dis tributed control and optimization-based methods. The distributed control methods consume less time, but poorly handle and extend to multiple constraints. Instead, optimization-based methods handle constraints effectively, but they are usually centralized, time-consuming and thus not easily scalable to numerous robots. To overcome drawbacks of both, we propose a novel cooperative transportation method for nonholonomic mobile robots by im proving conventional formation control, which is distributed, has a low time-complexity and accommodates scalable constraints. The proposed control-based method is testified on a cable suspended payload and divided into two parts, including robot trajectory generation and trajectory tracking. Unlike most time consuming trajectory generation methods, ours can generate trajectories with only constant time-complexity, needless of global maps. As for trajectory tracking, our control-based method not only scales easily to multiple constraints as those optimization based methods, but reduces their time-complexity from poly nomial to linear. Simulations and experiments can verify the feasibility of our method.