A Non-Contact Object Delivery System Using Leader-Follower Formation Control for Multi-Robots

Rapid improvements in the area of multi-robot control algorithms pave the way to design and implement robotic swarms to deal with sophisticated tasks including intelligent object transportation systems. It is crucial to manage the structure of the numerous robots to behave like a whole body for task accomplishment. The leader-follower formation control approach offers a simple and reliable way of keeping the swarm formation in appropriate limits to cope with challenging tasks. Autonomous object transportation with multi-robot systems enjoy the benefits of the leader-follower formation control approach. However, most of the developed transportation systems achieve the task by locating the load onto the robots or by pushing the load in the means of a physical contact. These approaches may lead to a hardware or payload damage due to heavy loads or physical contacts respectively. In this study, a novel non-contact object delivery system is introduced for eliminating the drawbacks of physical contact between the robots and the payload. Permanent magnets are used for propulsion of the payload located on a cart with passive casters. The stability of the proposed multi-robot system is satisfied by a formation controller using potential functions method augmented with a cornering action sub-controller. The simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed system during a straight motion and cornering with the root mean square values of the distance between the robots as 1.46 × 10-4 [m] and 0.065 [m] respectively.