Efficient Cooperation of Heterogeneous Robotic Agents: A Decentralized Framework

Abstract

In social and industrial facilities of the future such as hospitals, hotels, and warehouses, teams of robots will be deployed to assist humans in accomplishing everyday tasks like object handling, transportation, or pickup and delivery operations. In such a context, different robots (e.g., mobile platforms, static manipulators, or mobile manipulators) with different actuation, manipulation, and perception capabilities must be coordinated to achieve various complex tasks (e.g., cooperative parts assembly in the automotive industry or loading and unloading of palettes in warehouses) that require collaborative actions with each other and with human operators. The efficient supervision and coordination of a heterogeneous system mandates a decentralized framework that integrates high-level task planning, low-level motion planning and control, and robust real-time sensing of the robot's dynamic environment. Decentralization in multiagent robotic systems is of utmost importance because it provides flexibility, scalability, and fault-tolerance capabilities. In this work, we present the architecture of the decentralized framework developed within the context of the European Union project Co4Robots and its application in a multitasking collaboration scenario involving various heterogeneous robots and humans.