On the development of cooperative behavior-based mobile manipulators

摘要

We present an approach to the problem of cooperative object transportation to be performed by a pair of autonomous mobile robots controlled with a behavior-based architecture. Inherent characteristics of this method such as simplicity, rapid development, robustness, and low memory and processing requirements have allowed us to implement a behavioral control system in rather simple, low-processing-power mobile platforms. Robot coordination may be achieved through either implicit or explicit communication. Although implicit communication can make the system more robust to faulty communication environments, we show that the use of the explicit form can avoid some undesirable system locks. Experimental results where two robots carry a relatively large box in an environment cluttered with both easily and hardly avoidable obstacles show the flexibility and effectiveness of the proposed architecture.