Pose Control of a Spherical Object Held by Deformable Sheet with Multiple Robots

摘要

This paper presents a robotic design for transporting a spherical object that is manipulated by a mobile robot team through a deformable sheet. The design goal is to control the position and orientation (i.e., pose) of the object through the collective motion of the robotic team. We first derive a kinematic model to describe the object motion in the deformable sheet. The effect of the mobile robots’ motion on the object is studied and analyzed. We then design a distributed controller for each robot to manipulate the pose of the object. The analysis and experimental results show the controller has the ability to successfully manipulate the object pose to follow a given position and orientation profile.