Differential Geometric Approach to Trajectory Planning: Cooperative Transport by a Team of Autonomous Marine Vehicles
For roboticists working on multi-vehicle cooperative manipulation, this provides a geometric framework for constrained trajectory planning, though it is an incremental application of existing methods.
The paper addresses cooperative transport of a buoyant load by multiple autonomous surface vehicles (ASVs) using differential geometry to model constraints. Distributed feedback control strategies were synthesized and experimentally validated with micro ASVs, achieving trajectory tracking.
In this paper we addressed the cooperative transport problem for a team of autonomous surface vehicles (ASVs) towing a single buoyant load. We consider the dynamics of the constrained system and decompose the cooperative transport problem into a collection of subproblems. Each subproblem consists of an ASV and load pair where each ASV is attached to the load at the same point. Since the system states evolve on a smooth manifold, we use the tools from differential geometry to model the holonomic constraint arising from the cooperative transport problem and the non-holonomic constraints arising from the ASV dynamics. We then synthesize distributed feedback control strategies using the proposed mathematical modeling framework to enable the team transport the load on a desired trajectory. We experimentally validate the proposed strategy using a team of micro ASVs.