Tight cooperative working system by multiple robots

The purpose of this study is to realize a multiple robot system which can be easily developed and managed. In order to perform robust cooperative work, it is necessary that multiple robots can achieve not only a high level of cooperation without communication but also simple cooperation with communication, and then switch between modes according to the situation. We call such cooperative work "tight cooperation". To achieve such cooperation, there must be an integrated concept in the system about structure in a robot and whole system. We propose a method for the construction of such a multiple robot system based on this concept. We constructed a cooperative working system called ICRoS and implemented it on two hexapod robots with parallel processors. We verified the effectiveness of this multiple robot system with four different experiments involving the cooperative lifting of a box.

[1]  Hiroshi Kimura,et al.  Motion recognition based cooperation between human operating robot and autonomous assistant robot , 1997, Proceedings of International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[2]  John S. Bay,et al.  Toward the development of a material transport system using swarms of ant-like robots , 1993, [1993] Proceedings IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[3]  Bruce Randall Donald,et al.  Analyzing teams of cooperating mobile robots , 1994, Proceedings of the 1994 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[4]  Lynne E. Parker,et al.  ALLIANCE: an architecture for fault tolerant, cooperative control of heterogeneous mobile robots , 1994, Proceedings of IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS'94).

[5]  Hirochika Inoue,et al.  Tumbling Objects Using a Multi-fingered Robot , 1991 .

[6]  Toyomi Fujita,et al.  The design of software development system for multiple robots , 1993, Proceedings of 1993 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS '93).

[7]  Jun Ota,et al.  Transferring Control by Cooperation of Two Mobile Robots , 1996 .

[8]  Kazuhiro Kosuge,et al.  Load sharing of decentralized-controlled multiple mobile robots handling a single object , 1997, Proceedings of International Conference on Robotics and Automation.