A Motion Planning Approach for Marsupial Robotic Systems

Abstract

This paper outlines an algorithmic approach for the automatic coordination and planning of heterogeneous multi-robot teams. Specifically, this work addresses the marsupial-based subset of multi-robot teams, where “carrier” robots transport and deploy “passenger” robots. The approach starts with a high-level watershed segmentation of the world to determine the free-space regions accessible by each robot in the team. Topological graph planning then decides the high-level motion plan for each robot between these free-space regions. Finally, a low-level path planner generates optimized, dynamically-feasible trajectories for each robot along the topological path. The performance of the approach is evaluated in simulation and through hardware experiments.