Decentralized motion control for cooperative manipulation with a team of networked mobile manipulators

In this paper we consider the cooperative control of the manipulation of a load on a plane by a team of mobile robots. We propose two different novel solutions. The first is a controller which ensures exact tracking of the load twist. This controller is partially decentralized since, locally, it does not rely on the state of all the robots but needs only to know the system parameters and load twist. Then we propose a fully decentralized controller that differs from the first one for the use of i) a decentralized estimation of the parameters and twist of the load based only on local measurements of the velocity of the contact points and ii) a discontinuous robustification term in the control law. The second controller ensures a practical stabilization of the twist in presence of estimation errors. The theoretical results are finally corroborated with a simulation campaign evaluating different manipulation settings.