Cooperative transportation of a rod using mobile agents

Abstract

This paper presents an algorithm for cooperatively transporting an object with a long and narrow shape by multiple robots without any initial knowledge. In our transportation system, the cooperation is achieved through communications of the pheromone used by social insects such as ants, which is implemented as mobile agents migrating from one site to another site on a WiFi network. Each pheromone agent diffuses through the migrations while cloning it. Once it reaches an idle robot, it attracts the robot to a suitable point of the object along a vector value that it has inside. We previously proposed a transportation manner based on the mobile agents for objects with regular polygon shapes, which does not work well for an object such as a rod with only a pushable edge because of the property suppressing a roll of an object. We propose a new mobile agent based transportation manner that rather rolls the object to the direction suitable for pushing. We have implemented a simulator to prove the effectiveness of our transportation manner, and conducted some experiments on it. We discuss the successful rate and the efficiency of our manner through the results.