自律形マルチロボットシステムによる協調搬送動作生成

抄録

In the present paper, the authors propose a reconfigurable multi robot system which consists of many robotic dolly units capable of transporting a heavy object in a group and a central unit for measuring the object's motion and distributing the acquired information to all dolly units. The system has no hierarchical control structure or supervising host computer, but is capable of achieving cooperative transportation by individual autonomous motion control of each dolly unit. A systematic calibration method of the position of each dolly unit and alignment of its local coordinate against the central unit's coordinate, and subsequent motion control algorithm to trace a target path given by a user are proposed. Result of the proposed methods is demonstrated by a series of experiments. Additionally, a feedback control scheme to reduce the effect of position estimation error is also proposed and demonstrated.