Moving furniture with teams of autonomous robots

Abstract

The authors wish to organize furniture in a room with a team of robots that can push objects. The authors show how coordinated pushing by robots can change the pose (position and orientation) of objects and then they ask whether planning, global control, and explicit communication are necessary for cooperatively changing the pose of objects. The authors answer in the negative and present, as witnesses, four cooperative manipulation protocols that use different amounts of state, sensing, and communication. The authors analyze these protocols in the information invariant framework. The authors formalize the notion of resource tradeoffs for robot protocols and give the tradeoffs for the specific protocols discussed here.