Control Strategy Based on Swarms Algorithms to Cooperative Payload Transport Using a Non-Holonomic Mobile Robots Group

Abstract

Cooperative payload transport's systems commonly use schemes of coordination and control in order to maintain the formation of the robots involved in the transport task. For this purpose the leader follower algorithm or any of its variations is used. However this kind of systems use, in most cases, control schemes that do not consider in their design the influence of payload physical properties such as geometry, weight, position of center of mass and density. In this scenario, the classic coordination schemas as the leader following causes a considerable loss of efficiency. For this reason, in this work a swarm based control strategy is proposed in order to estimate the object center of mass dynamically. In this way, an explicit, non-centralized coordination schema, which is oriented to the development of payload transport task in structured environments. The results obtained in this work are focused on measuring system stability, robot control efforts and trajectory pose errors. Different trajectories were tested, and the results compared with the classic coordination method of leader following.