Cooperative transportation of a large object - development of an industrial application

There has been an increasing demand from industry to transport very large objects. A realistic option is to use two or more cooperating automatically guided vehicles (AGVs) to handle these types of loads. This work describes the design of a decentralized controller that makes the AGVs track an externally provided planar velocity setpoint while minimizing the interconnection forces between the load and the vehicles. The load is assumed to be rigidly connected to the AGVs. The derived local controllers have the same structure as the controllers that are normally used for individual operation. As a result, changing a few parameter settings and providing the AGVs with identical setpoints is all that is required to achieve cooperative behavior on the velocity level. Preliminary results obtained with two rigidly interconnected AGVs are discussed to illustrate the experimental validity of the control design.