Occlusion-Based Cooperative Transport for Concave Objects with a Swarm of Miniature Mobile Robots

TL;DR

This paper introduces an occlusion-based method for swarm robots to collectively transport concave objects by filling their cavities to form convex pseudo-objects, enabling decentralized handling without prior shape knowledge.

Contribution

It presents a novel decentralized strategy that uses occlusion to transform concave objects into convex pseudo-objects for easier transport by robot swarms.

Findings

Effective concavity filling demonstrated on various objects

Successful collective transport without prior shape knowledge

Decentralized approach reduces communication needs

Abstract

An occlusion based strategy for collective transport of a concave object using a swarm of mobile robots has been proposed in this paper. We aim to overcome the challenges of transporting concave objects using decentralized approach. The interesting aspect of this task is that the agents have no prior knowledge about the geometry of the object and do not explicitly communicate with each other. The concept is to eliminate the concavity of the object by filling a number of robots in its cavity and then carry out an occlusion based transport strategy on the newly formed convex object or "pseudo object". We divide our work into two parts: concavity filling of various concave objects and occlusion based collective transport of convex objects.