A common reference object concept to cooperative transportation

A concept called "common reference object" is proposed for cooperative transportation and decentralized system consisting of multiple noholonomic mobile robots is constructed to demonstrate the present concept. In this system, one agent acts as the leader, which is able to plan and manipulate the omnidirectional motion of the object. Other agents referred to, as followers are equipped with compliance arms and cooperatively transport the object by keeping a constant position relative to the object. During transportation operation, the leader robot can not only plan the motion of the object but also broadcast the local velocity of the object to other agents. Then, each follower receives such information and generates its own velocity in the local coordinate using a mapping process. In this paper, neural network (NN) and genetic algorithm (GA) are tested in identifying the mapping process. Simulation results show a good performance of the present system.