A car transportation system by multiple mobile robots - iCART -

In this paper, we propose a new car transportation system referred to as iCART(intelligent cooperative autonomous robot transporters). This system consists of two robots for the car transportation. Each robot is controlled by using a decentralized control algorithm for transporting the car in coordination. A trajectory for transporting the car is given to one of robots, and another robot estimates the trajectory through the interaction force between two robots. This car transportation system could transport any size of cars, and is available for any kinds of car transportation tasks such as parking, ballet parking, tow away service, and the transportation of cars at a factory, ferry, parking area, etc. The proposed car transportation system are developed and the control algorithm is experimentally applied to them. The experimental results illustrate the validity of the proposed system.