Abstract
This paper deals with a kinematic analysis of locomotive cooperation necessary for two mobile robots to carry a long bar along a general wavy road. The robots are assumed to be driven by crawler mechanism and to have a single link arm which moves only prismatically. The robots have a task to carry a long bar with keeping its height and length constant and its posture horizontal. The analysis of kinematic conditions done for a sinusoidal wavy road is expanded for a one-dimensional general wavy road, and we find that there exist 14 patterns in the relationship between two solution curves of mobile robot and reveal that two kinds of cooperation mode are needed: one is to change the direction of locomotion and the other is to alternate the robot role from “master” to “servant” and vice versa. We further develop the algorithm for the locomotive cooperation.
