Mutli-Robot Cooperative Object Transportation with Guaranteed Safety and Convergence in Planar Obstacle Cluttered Workspaces via Configuration Space Decomposition

In this work, we consider the autonomous object transportation problem employing a team of mobile manipulators within a compact planar workspace with obstacles. As the object is allowed to translate and rotate and each robot is equipped with a manipulator consisting of one or more moving links, the overall system (object and mobile manipulators) should adapt its shape in a flexible way so that it fulfills the transportation task with safety. To this end, we built a sequence of configuration space cells, each of which defines an allowable set of configurations of the object, as well as explicit intervals for each manipulator’s states. Furthermore, appropriately designed under- and over-approximations of the free configuration space are used in an innovative way to guide the configuration space’s exploration without loss of completeness. In addition, we coupled methodologies based on Reference Governors and Prescribed Performance Control with harmonic maps, in order to design a distributed control law for implementing the transitions specified by the high-level planner, which possesses guaranteed invariance and global convergence properties, thus avoiding the requirement for synchronized motion as inherently dictated by the majority of the related works. Furthermore, the proposed low-level control law does not require continuous information exchange between the robots, which rely only on measurements of the object’s configuration and their own states. Finally, a transportation scenario within a complex warehouse workspace demonstrates the proposed approach and verifies its efficiency.