Object transportation by cooperative robots

In this paper, we present a cooperative object transportation strategy for a pair of nonholonomic vehicles. We demonstrate via experiments that cooperative robots can be used to autonomously transport an object that is too heavy or cumbersome for a single robot to do individually using minimal inter-vehicle communication. The proposed control strategy is divided in three phases: contact, re-orientation, and cooperative transportation. The first two phases consist of driving the robots from any arbitrary initial configuration toward the object, establishing physical contact with the object, and re-orienting themselves according to the objects desired destination. The third phase consists of cooperatively transporting the object by assuming a novel inter-vehicle topology. The two first phases require initial inter-vehicle communication, whereas the third phases assumes that each robot is rigidly connected to the object. Collectively, these results demonstrate the ability to transport an object using multiple robots with minimal intervehicle communication.