Cooperative transport system with regrasping car-like mobile robots

This paper deals with motion planning of cooperative transfer with regrasping by a group of car-like mobile robots. In order to realize this transfer task by actual car-like robots, three aspects should be considered: the nonholonomic characteristic of car-like robots, how to control the force and avoid too large a force by position-controlled robots, and control cycle of the system. Based on algorithms from previous works, the authors propose the following approach: 1) designing robot hand mechanism; 2) constructing hybrid planning architecture composed of centralized and decentralized system including an object motion observer. A simple transport experiment by an actual robot system is made to show the effectiveness of this mechanism. Validity of the proposed method is verified by a transport simulation.