Adaptive Cooperative Manipulation with Rolling Contacts

Abstract

In this paper we present a novel adaptive cooperative manipulation controller for multiple mobile robots with rolling contacts. Our approach exploits rolling effects of passive end-effectors and does not require force/torque sensing. Moreover, the proposed scheme is robust to uncertain dynamics of the object and agents including object center of mass, inertia, weight, and Coriolis terms. In addition, we present a novel closed-form internal force controller that guarantees no slip throughout the manipulation task. The adaptive controller design ensures boundedness of the estimated model parameters in predefined sets. Numerical simulations validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.