Planning coordinated motions for tethered planar mobile robots
This addresses the challenge of coordinating tethered robots in shared workspaces, which is incremental as it builds on prior work on cable entanglement detection.
The paper tackles the motion planning problem for multiple tethered planar mobile robots, proposing algorithms to detect realizable target cable configurations and generate valid coordinated motion plans, validated through simulations and hardware experiments.
This paper considers the motion planning problem for multiple tethered planar mobile robots. Each robot is attached to a fixed base by a flexible cable. Since the robots share a common workspace, the interactions amongst the robots, cables, and obstacles pose significant difficulties for planning. Previous works have studied the problem of detecting whether a target cable configuration is intersecting (or entangled). Here, we are interested in the motion planning problem: how to plan and coordinate the robot motions to realize a given non-intersecting target cable configuration. We identify four possible modes of motion, depending on whether (i) the robots move in straight lines or following their cable lines; (ii) the robots move sequentially or concurrently. We present an in-depth analysis of Straight & Concurrent, which is the most practically-interesting mode of motion. In particular, we propose algorithms that (a) detect whether a given target cable configuration is realizable by a Straight & Concurrent motion, and (b) return a valid coordinated motion plan. The algorithms are analyzed in detail and validated in simulations and in a hardware experiment.