Transferring Control by Cooperation of Two Mobile Robots.

Abstract

A coordinated control method for two mobile robots without explicit communication is presented in this paper. Concretely, transferring control by cooperation of two robots is realized from the viewpoints of mechanical design and of control system design. In the mechanical design, compliance mechanism with 3 degrees of freedom is added on one of the robots in order to avoid extreme inner forces between the robots. In the control system design, leader-follower method is adopted. “Virtual Impedance Method” is used for controlling the follower robot. A deadlock problem, where a robot stops at some other positions from a target position of the robot, is solved by transforming lateral virtual forces to virtual moments. Effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by experimental results. The proposed method is applicable to multiple mobile robot system by increasing the number of followers.