Optimization of potential field method parameters through networks for swarm cooperative manipulation tasks

Rocco Furferi,Alessandro Ridolfi,Enrico Meli,Roberto Conti

doi:10.1177/1729881416657931

Abstract

An interesting current research field related to autonomous robots is mobile manipulation performed by cooperating robots (in terrestrial, aerial and underwater environments). Focusing on the underwater scenario, cooperative manipulation of Intervention-Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (I-AUVs) is a complex and difficult application compared with the terrestrial or aerial ones because of many technical issues, such as underwater localization and limited communication. A decentralized approach for cooperative mobile manipulation of I-AUVs based on Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) is proposed in this article. This strategy exploits the potential field method; a multi-layer control structure is developed to manage the coordination of the swarm, the guidance and navigation of I-AUVs and the manipulation task. In the article, this new strategy has been implemented in the simulation environment, simulating the transportation of an object. This object is moved along a desired trajectory in an unknown environment and it is transported by four underwater mobile robots, each one provided with a seven-degrees-of-freedom robotic arm. The simulation results are optimized thanks to the ANNs used for the potentials tuning.

Highlights

Mobile manipulation performed by cooperating robots, with one or more arms, is for sure a challenging and an open research topic for autonomous robots (Figure 1(a)), especially in relation to an underwater environment.[1,2,3,4] Such kinds of systems can have the capability of performing complex tasks that cannot be reached using a single manipulator.Cooperative manipulation of Intervention-Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (I-AUVs) (Figure 1(b))[5] represents a more complex field of application, compared with the terrestrial or aerial applications, mainly due to different technological problems e.g. localization and communication in underwater environment
The main drawback of the current approaches is mainly related to the low frequency of the vehicle position update: this is hardly acceptable for cooperative manipulation tasks because the position update at a higher frequency is important to obtain correct control actions
The simulated tasks are referred to the potential functions shown in the section ‘A new strategy for I-AUVs swarms performing cooperative mobile manipulation’

Summary

Introduction

Mobile manipulation performed by cooperating robots, with one or more arms, is for sure a challenging and an open research topic for autonomous robots (Figure 1(a)), especially in relation to an underwater environment.[1,2,3,4] Such kinds of systems can have the capability of performing complex tasks that cannot be reached using a single manipulator.Cooperative manipulation of Intervention-Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (I-AUVs) (Figure 1(b))[5] represents a more complex field of application, compared with the terrestrial or aerial applications, mainly due to different technological problems e.g. localization and communication in underwater environment. Underwater swarm localization is usually based on expensive sensors, such as long base-line or USBL, able to provide the proper position of each vehicle in the world reference frame.[12,17] The main drawback of the current approaches is mainly related to the low frequency of the vehicle position update: this is hardly acceptable for cooperative manipulation tasks because the position update at a higher frequency is important to obtain correct control actions.

Results

Conclusion