Obstacle avoidance via social mediation in cooperative payload transportation

Abstract

This paper presents a negotiation-based obstacle avoidance scheme for teams involved in cooperative load transportation. A decentralised behaviour-based cooperative control coordinates the team's motion. The negotiation protocol is implemented as one of the behaviours within the control scheme, and utilises explicit and local communication. We tested the cooperative control in simulation and show that the cooperative control is successful as well as scalable and robust. We also demonstrate the strength of the fuzzy logic based motion controllers in mitigating the effects of approximate team heading.