Yonghui Yang, Wangbao Xu, Genxi Rong, Xiaoping Liu, and Xuebo Chen
Swarm robotics, formation control, cooperative transport, artificial moment method
Cooperative transport of swarm-robots is a challenging problem in robotics and holds the promise of a wide range of applications. For the problem, each robot is required, in general, to reach a different task-point to form a transport formation, where all task-points are given in the initial stage. A self-organizing approach is proposed for forming complex swarm-robot transport formations. In the method, for each robot Ri at each sampling time, Ri’s task-point is determined by an artificial post algorithm. And then, Ri’s attractive segment and attractive point are computed by a new method that is much simpler and easier to understand than the existing ones. Under the guidance of the attractive point, Ri’s artificial moment motion controller makes Ri move one step. At the next time, the above steps are repeated until a desired formation is achieved. Simulations indicate that no matter how many robots exist and how complex the transported object is, a desired formation can be always formed by the method in a sub-optimal and self-organizing way.
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