Coordinated transportation with minimal explicit communication between robots

Abstract

We propose and demonstrate how attractor dynamics can be used to design and implement a distributed dynamic control architecture that enables a team of two robots, without force/torque sensors and equipped solely with low-level sensors, to carry a long object and simultaneously avoid obstacles. The explicit required communication between robots is minimal. The robots have no prior knowledge of their environment. Experimental results in indoor environments show that if parameter values are chosen within reasonable ranges then the overall system works quite well even in cluttered environments. The robots’ behavior is stable and the generated trajectories are smooth.