Collective transport of robots: coherent, minimalist multi-robot leader-following

Authors:
Megha Gupta;Jnaneshwar Das;Marcos A. M. Vieira;Hordur Heidarsson;Harshvardhan Vathsangam;Gaurav S. Sukhatme
Affiliations:
Robotic Embedded Systems Laboratory, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA;Robotic Embedded Systems Laboratory, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA;Robotic Embedded Systems Laboratory, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA;Robotic Embedded Systems Laboratory, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA;Robotic Embedded Systems Laboratory, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA;Robotic Embedded Systems Laboratory, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA
Venue:
IROS'09 Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE/RSJ international conference on Intelligent robots and systems
Year:
2009

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Abstract

We study the collective transport of robots (CTR) problem. A large number of commodity mobile robots are to be moved from one location to another by a single operator. Joysticking each one or carrying them physically is impractical. None of the robots are particularly sophisticated in their ability to plan or reason. Prior work on flocking and formation control has addressed the transport of a robot group that maintains its integrity by explicitly controlling coherence. We show how flocking emerges as a consequence of each robot contending for space near the human operator. A coherent flock can be made to follow a leader in this manner thereby solving the CTR problem. We also present the design of a hand-worn IMU-based gesture interface which allows the human operator to issue simple commands to the group. A preliminary experimental evaluation of the system shows robust CTR with different leader behaviors.