Abstract
Increasing demands in automation entail that some tasks either cannot be accomplished by a single robotic manipulator or it is economically not meaningful to indiscriminately increase the robot’s size or sophistication. At the same time, ongoing technological progress has paved the way for an increased usage of cost-effective robotic agents. Hence, the question whether the cooperation of multiple simple robotic agents is expedient to accomplish automation tasks is raised. Possible benefits are manifold, e.g., an increased versatility, resilience regarding failure, and the ability to solve more complex and larger tasks. A meaningful benchmark problem in distributed robotics is the cooperative object transportation where mobile robots organize around the object to move it by pushing. Thus, this paper deals with the question of how to allocate robotic agents around the object. Novelly, the problem is treated using second-order dynamics, explicitly including and limiting the exerted force of the agents. We derive a description of the manipulation space in terms of a zonotope which is useful for robotic manipulation beyond the scope of this benchmark problem. The proposed scheme’s versatility and functionality is demonstrated by experimental results.
This work is supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Grant 433183605 and through Germany’s Excellence Strategy (Project PN4-4 Theoretical Guarantees for Predictive Control in Adaptive Multi-Agent Scenarios) under Grant EXC2075-390740016.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Bertoncelli, F., Ruggiero, F., Sabattini, L.: Characterization of grasp configurations for multi-robot object pushing. In: Proceedings of the 2021 IEEE International Symposium on Multi-Robot and Multi-Agent Systems, pp. 38–46. Cambridge, UK (2021)
Ebel, H.: Distributed control and organization of communicating mobile robots: design, simulation, and experimentation. Dissertation, Schriften aus dem Institut für Technische und Numerische Mechanik der Universität Stuttgart, vol. 69, Shaker Verlag (2021). https://www.itm.uni-stuttgart.de/institut/team/ebel/Ebel2021.pdf
Ebel, H., Eberhard, P.: Non-prehensile cooperative object transportation with omnidirectional mobile robots: organization, control, simulation, and experimentation. In: Proceedings of the 2021 IEEE International Symposium on Multi-Robot and Multi-Agent Systems, pp. 1–10. Cambridge, UK (2021)
Ebel, H., Fahse, D.N., Rosenfelder, M., Eberhard, P.: Finding formations for the non-prehensile object transportation with differentially-driven mobile robots. In: Kecskeméthy, A., Parenti-Castelli, V. (eds.) ROMANSY 24 - Robot Design, Dynamics and Control ROMANSY 2022. CISM International Centre for Mechanical Sciences, vol. 606, pp. 163–170. Springer, Cham (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06409-8_17
Huang, A., Olson, E., Moore, D.: LCM: lightweight communications and marshalling. In: Proceedings of the 2010 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, pp. 4057–4062. Taipei (2010)
Prattichizzo, D., Trinkle, J.C.: Grasping. In: Siciliano, B., Khatib, O. (eds.) Springer Handbook of Robotics, pp. 671–700. Springer, Berlin, Germany (2008)
Rosenfelder, M., Ebel, H., Eberhard, P.: A force-based control approach for the non-prehensile cooperative transportation of objects using omnidirectional mobile robots. In: Proceedings of the 2022 IEEE Conference on Control Technology and Applications (CCTA), pp. 349–356. Trieste, Italy (2022)
Rosenfelder, M., Ebel, H., Eberhard, P.: Experiment videos of the force-based non-prehensile cooperative transportation of objects with mobile robots (2023). https://doi.org/10.18419/darus-3331
Tuci, E., Alkilabi, M.H.M., Akanyeti, O.: Cooperative object transport in multi-robot systems: a review of the state-of-the-art. Front. Robot. AI 5, 59 (2018)
Ziegler, G.M.: Lectures on Polytopes, vol. 152. Springer, New York, USA (2012)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Rosenfelder, M., Ebel, H., Eberhard, P. (2023). A Force-Based Formation Synthesis Approach for the Cooperative Transportation of Objects. In: Petrič, T., Ude, A., Žlajpah, L. (eds) Advances in Service and Industrial Robotics. RAAD 2023. Mechanisms and Machine Science, vol 135. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32606-6_37
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32606-6_37
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-32605-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-32606-6
eBook Packages: Intelligent Technologies and RoboticsIntelligent Technologies and Robotics (R0)