Research On The Cooperative Motion Control Of Multiple Mobile Robots

Single robot can not fulfill the demands of one complicated task sometimes, so the alternative approach, multi-robot cooperation, turns to be more and more significative. Nowadays, the cooperative robotics, as a rising cross subject, integrates the theories of distributed AI, sociology, management science and biology etc. It discusses many topics systematically, such as architecture, communication, cooperative behaviors and evolution of the robot system. Especially, multi-robot cooperative control guarantees the successes of large object transportation, space exploration, search-rescue and some other tasks. To satisfy these requirements, researches on multi-robot cooperative control has become a focus of robotics.Firstly, the paper surveys the developments of cooperative robotics and several influential multiple robot systems. Following the main topics about multiple mobile robots, the main research methods, the characteristics and key technology of cooperative control of multiple robots are introduced. The paper introduces the sensor models which describe the information perception method about the environment. Also this paper explained the protocols of message transmission, mode and the topology of communication between robots.Relative pose decection and localization are firmly essential in cooperative robotics. Focusing on the problem of cooperative localization of multiple robots, an approach based on extended kalman filter is proposed, which evaluates and updates the relative poses between robots so that the capability of cooperative localization are enhanced. Simutaneously, the location errors of mutiple mobile robots are analyzed.The coordination of multiple mobile robots, decision making and task assignment are upper level control issues of the robot system. For the material collecting task in the constrained workspace, a Petri net based cooperative task assignment scheme is addressed. The Petri net models of the basic crossing cell and the whole workspace are contructed respectively. Especially, the task assignment model and the collision avoidance methods are presented for the coordination of multiple robots.Formation keeping and obstacle avoidance of multi-robot are the challenging topics in mobile robotics. This paper investigates the mathematical models of the formation based on two different methods, kinetics method and geometry method, respectively. A novel approach of compound control is presented based on kinetics method, it deals with the formation control by two different algorithms: a flexible feedback linearization algorithm and an optimal approximate target algorithms. These two algorithms are selected according to robot's desired...