Abstract
This paper proposes a formation-finding procedure for the non-prehensile transportation of arbitrarily-shaped polygonal objects with differentially-driven mobile robots. The proposed procedure is conceptually novel by taking a multibody system dynamics perspective, explicitly taking into account the robots’ non-holonomic constraints. Being based on proper first principles such as Jourdain’s principle, if the modeling assumptions are met, the approach nominally guarantees to only produce formations that are actually useful to manipulate the object in a given dynamic situation. As a byproduct, the scheme can directly provide a set of robot propulsion forces fitting the desired object motion. Simulation results confirm the chosen formations’ favorable qualities.
This work was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Grant 433183605 and through Germany’s Excellence Strategy (Project PN4-4 Theoretical Guarantees for Predictive Control in Adaptive Multi-Agent Scenarios) under Grant EXC 2075-390740016.
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Ebel, H., Fahse, D.N., Rosenfelder, M., Eberhard, P. (2022). Finding Formations for the Non-prehensile Object Transportation with Differentially-Driven Mobile Robots. In: Kecskeméthy, A., Parenti-Castelli, V. (eds) ROMANSY 24 - Robot Design, Dynamics and Control. ROMANSY 2022. CISM International Centre for Mechanical Sciences, vol 606. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06409-8_17
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