抄録
We have been investigating the flexible transporting system that can be realized by cooperative tasks of multiple mobile robots. This paper discusses the navigation method of mobile robots by beams of lights, we call them “light lines". Our method is simple and stable. The system is composed of a main robot and multiple sub robots. The main robot measures positions of the sub robots and a target, and guides the sub robots to the target. The sub robots move along light lines that projected from the main robot based on the navigation rule of “line trace robot". The features of our method are as follows: The sub robots are continuously steered by output of optical sensors. Therefore, the equipment of the sub robots is simple and low cost for practical applications. In this paper, the validity of this system is verified by some experiments of such a s the simultaneous control of four sub robots for the cleaning tasks. Then, it is shown that this method can easily detect obstacles that exist between the sub robots and the target by the light section method as the secondary application of the light lines.
