Morpho-functional characteristics of SSA-based two-mobile-robots system carrying a long bar on wavy road

Deals with characteristics of cooperative transportation of a long bar along a wavy road by two mobile robots. The robot module has a crawler body and a single degree-of-freedom prismatic arm. The task is to carry a long bar at constant support height and support distance along a one-dimensional sinusoidal wavy road. Their position and arm length are cooperatively adjusted by a subsumption architecture (SSA) control scheme according to their position on the wavy road. The SSA control scheme showed a successful achievement of the given task in most cases but the two robots were trapped in an inevitable deadlock situation for a particular initial position. Addition of one rotational degree-of-freedom to the arm can solve the deadlock problem. Finally the paper discusses some fundamental issues about the relationship between robot-body configuration/morphology, kinematics/dynamics, and intelligence from the results obtained