Traffic Management Strategies for Multi-Robotic Rigid Payload Transport Systems
This addresses traffic coordination for multi-robotic payload transport in obstacle-filled environments, but appears incremental as it builds on existing leader-follower control methods.
The paper tackles traffic management for multiple rigid payload transport systems with non-holonomic robots, using decentralized leader-follower control to avoid collisions with obstacles and other systems. Simulation results show the strategies effectively manage traffic for large numbers of systems, though no concrete performance numbers are provided.
In this work, we address traffic management of multiple payload transport systems comprising of non-holonomic robots. We consider loosely coupled rigid robot formations carrying a payload from one place to another. Each payload transport system (PTS) moves in various kinds of environments with obstacles. We ensure each PTS completes its given task by avoiding collisions with other payload systems and obstacles as well. Each PTS has one leader and multiple followers and the followers maintain a desired distance and angle with respect to the leader using a decentralized leader-follower control architecture while moving in the traffic. We showcase, through simulations the time taken by each PTS to traverse its respective trajectory with and without other PTS and obstacles. We show that our strategies help manage the traffic for a large number of PTS moving from one place to another.