Tight cooperative working system by multiple robots

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to realize a multiple robot system which can be easily developed and managed. In order to perform robust cooperative work, it is necessary that multiple robots can achieve not only a high level of cooperation without communication but also simple cooperation with communication, and then switch between modes according to the situation. We call such cooperative work "tight cooperation". To achieve such cooperation, there must be an integrated concept in the system about structure in a robot and whole system. We propose a method for the construction of such a multiple robot system based on this concept. We constructed a cooperative working system called ICRoS and implemented it on two hexapod robots with parallel processors. We verified the effectiveness of this multiple robot system with four different experiments involving the cooperative lifting of a box.