Task specific cooperative grasp planning for decentralized multi-robot systems

Abstract

Grasp planning in multi-robot systems is usually studied in a centralized setting with all robots sharing common knowledge about the overall system. Relaxing this assumption would allow multiple mobile manipulators to cooperate even without strict and precise coordination. Moreover, most typical tasks for cooperative settings, such as transporting heavy objects, require certain forces/torques to be exerted along/around particular directions, for instance, compensating for the weight of the transported object. In this paper, we propose task specific multi-robot grasp planning strategies that allow decentralized planning. Each agent plans its own actions without precise information about the other's plans. The approach is based on analysing a task specific grasp quality metric in a probabilistic context, compensating thus for the incomplete knowledge. Results from simulation experiments demonstrate that task independent planning is clearly inferior when task characteristics are known and thus task specific quality measures should be used. Furthermore, the proposed decentralized planning approaches clearly outperform the baseline and show close to globally optimal performance.