Guiding distributed manipulation with mobile sensors

Abstract

We attempt to organize furnitures with teams of mobile robots in dynamic, unstructured environments. We describe a distributed heterogeneous system of robots that cooperate to achieve this task. This system consists of two robot pushers and a mobile-sensor robot that guides and synchronizes the pushers. We present algorithms and experimental results for this system. We also discuss how this heterogeneous system of robots cooperates by decoupling and then fusing the navigation and manipulation sensory data.