Research on Multi-robot Cooperation Based on Leader-follower Method

Abstract

Compared with single robot system, multi-robot system has many outstanding advantages, such as parallelism, redundancy and spatial distribution characteristics. And at present, multi-robots system is already successfully applied in aerospace, automotive assembly welding, disaster relief and other fields. In this paper we specify the implementation of two mobile robots carrying a large size box to a given destination cooperatively, which is a typical example of multi-robot system. Firstly, inspired by the formation control, the leader-follower mechanism, which is often applied in the formation control, is introduced in this paper. Secondly, based on l φ − control mode of the leader-follower mechanism, a PID controller, whose input deviation is calculated by LOS (line-of-sight) method, for the leader robot, while a double input dual output fuzzy controller are designed for the follower robot to complete cooperative transport task. Lastly, an application written in C++ language is developed to verify the proposal. The experiment that controlling two amigo bots to transport a big size box to a given destination cooperatively is carried out in the indoor environment, and the experimental results show that the proposed method is effective.