A concept of common reference object to the cooperative transportation of multiple mobile robots

Aconcept named "common reference object" is proposed for a cooperative transportation using multiple nonholonomic mobile robots and a decentralized system is constructed to demonstrate the present concept. In this system, one agent acts as the leader which is able to plan and manipulate the omnidirectional motion of an object. Other agents referred to as followers cooperatively transport the object by keeping a constant position relative to the object. During the transportation operation, the leader robot can not only plan the motion of the object but also broadcast the local velocity of the object to other agents. Then, each follower receives such information and generates its own velocity in the local coordinate using a mapping process. In this paper, neural network (NN) and genetic algorithm (GA) are tested in identifying the mapping process. Simulation results show an acceptable performance of the present concept.