Transporting an elastic plate using a group of swarm mobile robots

This paper investigates a novel approach for transporting an elastic plate using a group of small swarm mobile robots. A formation of omnidirectional mobile robots transports a plate through an unknown environment purely by normal and friction forces between the robots and the plate. The scheme includes the calculation of normal forces by solving a linear complementary problem and the formation control of swarm robots while they keep the stability of the plate. An improved artificial potential field method is used for path planning and formation control of the mobile robots. The robots are controlled fully distributedly and the proposed scheme is carefully and successfully tested in various simulations posing rather sophisticated challenges both to its navigation and formation control subaspects.