Distributed decision making and control for cooperative transportation using mobile robots

Abstract

This paper introduces a distributed control scheme tailor-made to the task of letting a swarm of mobile robots push an object through a planar environment. Crucially, there is no centralized control instance or inter-robot hierarchy, and therefore, all decisions are made in a distributed manner. For being able to cooperate, the robots communicate, although the communication sampling time may be several times longer than the control sampling time. Most characteristic for the approach, distributed model predictive controllers are used to achieve a smooth transportation performance with the predicted control errors utilized to plan a suitable object trajectory. Challenging simulation scenarios show the applicability of the approach to the transportation task.