Low-Complexity Cooperative Payload Transportation for Nonholonomic Mobile Robots Under Scalable Constraints

TL;DR

This paper introduces a scalable, low-complexity distributed control method for cooperative payload transportation by nonholonomic mobile robots, improving efficiency and constraint handling over existing centralized and distributed approaches.

Contribution

It proposes a novel control-based method that enhances formation control, enabling scalable constraint management with constant time trajectory generation and linear time trajectory tracking.

Findings

Method is tested on cable suspended payloads.

Trajectory generation has constant time complexity.

Trajectory tracking scales linearly with constraints.

Abstract

Cooperative transportation, a key aspect of logistics cyber-physical systems (CPS), is typically approached using dis tributed control and optimization-based methods. The distributed control methods consume less time, but poorly handle and extend to multiple constraints. Instead, optimization-based methods handle constraints effectively, but they are usually centralized, time-consuming and thus not easily scalable to numerous robots. To overcome drawbacks of both, we propose a novel cooperative transportation method for nonholonomic mobile robots by im proving conventional formation control, which is distributed, has a low time-complexity and accommodates scalable constraints. The proposed control-based method is testified on a cable suspended payload and divided into two parts, including robot trajectory generation and trajectory tracking. Unlike most time consuming trajectory generation methods, ours can generate trajectories with only constant time-complexity, needless of global maps. As for trajectory tracking, our control-based method not only scales easily to multiple constraints as those optimization based methods, but reduces their time-complexity from poly nomial to linear. Simulations and experiments can verify the feasibility of our method.