Cooperative Manipulation in Unknown Environment with Distributed Control

Abstract

In this paper, a novel distributed control scheme for cooperative manipulation in unknown environment is developed for multi-robot system. Based on the compliant control framework, the follower robots interact with the leader robot through network communication to estimate the desired trajectory when has no ability to perceive the environment. The communication between the robot and its neighbors makes the trajectory tracking and force maintenance tasks of cooperative object manipulation perform both excellent, meanwhile, ensuring force unbiased tracking through trajectory compensation when environmental information is inaccurate. Numerical results are given to demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our method. With the proposed method, the robots are able to cooperatively manipulate an object in real time securely, while achieving the task of object carrying.