Collective transport of robots: Coherent, minimalist multi-robot leader-following

We study the collective transport of robots (CTR) problem. A large number of commodity mobile robots are to be moved from one location to another by a single operator. Joysticking each one or carrying them physically is impractical. None of the robots are particularly sophisticated in their ability...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in2009 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems pp. 5834 - 5840
Main Authors Gupta, M., Das, J., Vieira, M., Heidarsson, H., Vathsangam, H., Sukhatme, G.S.
Format Conference Proceeding
LanguageEnglish
Published IEEE 01.10.2009
Subjects
Computational geometry
Humanoid robots
Humans
Intelligent robots
Mobile robots
Orbital robotics
Robot sensing systems
Robustness
Spatial coherence
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Summary:We study the collective transport of robots (CTR) problem. A large number of commodity mobile robots are to be moved from one location to another by a single operator. Joysticking each one or carrying them physically is impractical. None of the robots are particularly sophisticated in their ability to plan or reason. Prior work on flocking and formation control has addressed the transport of a robot group that maintains its integrity by explicitly controlling coherence. We show how flocking emerges as a consequence of each robot contending for space near the human operator. A coherent flock can be made to follow a leader in this manner thereby solving the CTR problem. We also present the design of a hand-worn IMU-based gesture interface which allows the human operator to issue simple commands to the group. A preliminary experimental evaluation of the system shows robust CTR with different leader behaviors.
ISBN:9781424438037
1424438039
ISSN:2153-0858
2153-0866
DOI:10.1109/IROS.2009.5353934