Cooperative Transportation of a Single Object by Multiple Omni-directional Mobile Manipulators with Passive Joints Mechanism

Abstract

A cooperative transportation system with three position controlled mobile manipulators is developed using passive joint mechanisms. The installed passive joint mechanisms enable position controlled cooperative transportation with some robots, but they may cause the concentration of the object load on single manipulator because the load applied to each manipulator changes according to the postures of passive joint mechanisms due to the positioning error of mobile platforms. Therefore, a feedback control method of compensating the positioning error of the object is proposed considering the characteristics of the passive joint mechanisms. Then, the effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by experiments.