Experimental study of decentralized PVFC for cooperative mobile robots

Traditionally, tasks for a robotic system are specified by a desired timed trajectory. There, however, are many tasks in which the desired motions are specified by the state of system rather than time, such as contour following tasks. For such tasks, passive velocity field control (PVFC) has been proposed and the geometry of the controlled systems was analyzed. In this paper, a method to apply a decentralized PVFC to a cooperative multiple mobile robotic system whose sub-system is under nonholonomic constraints, which conveys a common rigid object in a horizontal plain, is proposed, and the effectiveness of the control method is demonstrated by experiments.