Use of Ball-based Movement for Omnidirectional Collaborative Carry Robot Systems

Robotics as a field has taken off in recent years, with a significant focus on autonomy. An area that has a great contribution to the autonomous aspect of collaborative robots is the actual movement mechanisms they use. When two robots are used to collaboratively carry an object, their movements are critical in order to maintain stable control of the shared object. There are many factors that can affect the usefulness of one drivetrain, but the key factor for successful collaborative carry is the degrees of freedom and how freely we can control them while other degrees are or are not being controlled. After constructing robots with each of the drivetrains, the testing showed that the proposed ball-based system brought several benefits to collaborative carry robots, with drawbacks in complexity.