Adaptive Coordinated Cooperative Control of Multi-Mobile Manipulators

Abstract

A coordinated group of robots can execute certain tasks, e.g. surveillance of large areas (Hougen et al., 2000), search and rescue (Jennings et al., 1997), and large objectstransportation (Stouten and De Graaf, 2004), more efficiently than a single specialized robot (Cao et al., 1997). Other tasks are simply not accomplishable by a single mobile robot, demanding a group of coordinated robots to perform it, like the problem of sensors and actuators positioning (Bicchi et al., 2008), and the entrapment/escorting mission (Antonelli et al., 2008). In such context, the term formation control arises, which can be defined as the problem of controlling the relative postures of the robots of a platoon that moves as a single structure (Consolini et al., 2007).