Motion planning for cooperative transportation of a large object by multiple mobile robots

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a motion planning method for cooperative transportation of a large object by multiple mobile robots in a complicated environment. We must plan the motions of the object and mobile robots to avoid obstacles in a three-dimensional environment. A computation time to solve this problem is exploded, since we need search a solution in a high dimensional configuration space (C-space). Accordingly, we reduce the dimensions of C-space using the feature of the transportation by multiple mobile robots. In our method, all things (the object, the robots and the obstacles) are represented by an octree that is the approximate cell decomposition method for a three-dimensional environment. We can find a solution with A* search algorithm in this smaller dimensional C-space using the potential field. We verify the effectiveness of our proposed motion planning method through simulations.