Cooperative Formation Planning and Control of Multiple Mobile Robots

Abstract

Application of intelligent Wheeled Mobile Robots (WMR) for material handling in the manufacturing environment has been the topic of research in the past decade. Even though researchers have succeeded in applying mobile robots for material handling purpose in the shop floor environment, transporting heavy objects in the assembly line is still a challenge. The dynamical characteristics of a manufacturing environment impose particular abilities a mobile robot should have if it is to operate on the shop floor efficiently, accurately and successfully. Consequently, a WMR needs to adapt itself to everlasting changes. Under such conditions, the use of multiple WMR in closed defined geometric spatial pattern/ formation can be a solution for such applications. One of the essential problems in guiding multiple mobile robots in such dynamically changing environments is to plan, navigate and coordinate the motion of robots, avoiding obstacles as well as each other while transporting the materials/objects towards the goal. Further it requires the robots to control their relative position and orientation between them on the fly. Hence the control of group of mobile robots performing such tasks requires coordination at different levels starting from navigation to formation (Sugar et al., 2001). A variety of strategies and control approaches for formation control of group of coordinated robots, have been adopted in the literature such as Graph Theory (Desai, 2002), Vector Potential Field (Yamaguchi et al., 2001), Virtual Structure (Belta & Kumar, 2004), Leader Follower (Fierro et al., 2002) and Behaviour Based Approaches (Arkin, 1998; Goldberg & Mataric, 2002). Further, a comprehensive review of robotic formation, control approaches and algorithms, applications and their advantages and disadvantages have also been addressed (Chen & Wang, 2005). Among all the approaches mentioned in the literature, behaviour – based and leader – follower approach has been widely adopted and well recognized by the researchers because of their simplicity and scalability. Even though robots are able to move in a closed defined formation when controlled using the various methods reported in the literature, the major limitation has been the difficulty to achieve a stable formation between the robots in the group in dynamically changing, unknown environments filled with obstacles. Under such circumstances, as the number of robots increases, the control methods such as the virtual structure, leader follower and