A Force-Based Control Approach for the Non-Prehensile Cooperative Transportation of Objects Using Omnidirectional Mobile Robots

摘要

The increasing complexity and scale of today's tasks assigned to autonomous robotic systems entails that it is often neither possible nor efficient to accomplish the given task in a reliable and performant manner by utilizing a sophisticated individual robot. Instead, distributed robotics brings about the potential to master complex tasks by means of comparatively simple robots. This anticipation is enhanced by continuous advances in communication, processing units, and sensors. In that regard, this paper considers the model problem of non-prehensile cooperative transportation of objects. Relying on optimization-based methods, a group of omnidirectional mobile robots is enabled to push arbitrary polygonal, possibly non-convex, objects along a desired path in the plane. In contrast to some of the authors' previous work, this paper novelly proposes an approach to manipulate the object based on force-level considerations. This is of particular interest since it provides the opportunity to naturally consider heterogeneous robotic groups or to handle more intricate scenarios such as transporting deformable objects. The proposed scheme's functionality and versatility is demonstrated through simulation scenarios.