Emulation of Mechanical Structures Through a Multi-agent Robot System: An Overview

This paper presents an overview of recent results on the use of a group of differential-drive mobile robots to emulate the motion of different types of mechanical structures. The type of mechanical structure is emulated by choosing suitable relative position vectors between the mobile robots. A control law is proposed to achieve such relative positions. It is shown that despite of the simplicity of the control law it is possible to emulate the mechanical structures changing only the corresponding relative position vectors and their time derivative. Numerical simulations and real-time experiments show the performance of the control law.

[1]  Maciej Michalek,et al.  Application of the VFO method to set-point control for the N-trailer vehicle with off-axle hitching , 2012, Int. J. Control.

[2]  Kar-Han Tan,et al.  Virtual structures for high-precision cooperative mobile robotic control , 1996, Proceedings of IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems. IROS '96.

[3]  E. Aranda-Bricaire,et al.  Marching control of unicycles based on the leader-followers scheme , 2009, 2009 35th Annual Conference of IEEE Industrial Electronics.

[4]  Jaime González-Sierra,et al.  Formation Tracking with Orientation Convergence for Groups of Unicycles , 2013 .

[5]  Andrew B. Kahng,et al.  Cooperative Mobile Robotics: Antecedents and Directions , 1997, Auton. Robots.

[6]  Jaime González-Sierra,et al.  Design of a virtual mechanism for trajectory tracking of convoys of mobile robots , 2013, 2013 10th International Conference on Electrical Engineering, Computing Science and Automatic Control (CCE).

[7]  Randal W. Beard,et al.  A decentralized approach to formation maneuvers , 2003, IEEE Trans. Robotics Autom..

[8]  Eduardo Aranda-Bricaire,et al.  Time-varying formation control for multi-agent systems applied to n-trailer configuration , 2011, 2011 8th International Conference on Electrical Engineering, Computing Science and Automatic Control.

[9]  Jaime González-Sierra,et al.  Emulation of n−trailer Systems through Differentially Driven Multi-Agent Systems: Continuous- and Discrete- Time Approaches , 2014, J. Intell. Robotic Syst..

[10]  F. Jean.  The car with N Trailers : characterization of the singular configurations , 1996 .

[11]  Boumediene Belkhouche,et al.  Modeling and controlling a robotic convoy using guidance laws strategies , 2005, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part B (Cybernetics).

[12]  Jean-Paul Laumond,et al.  Controllability of a multibody mobile robot , 1991, Fifth International Conference on Advanced Robotics 'Robots in Unstructured Environments.

[13]  Khac Duc Do,et al.  Formation tracking control of unicycle-type mobile robots , 2007, Proceedings 2007 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[14]  R. W. Brockett,et al.  Asymptotic stability and feedback stabilization , 1982 .

[15]  C. Altafini.  Some properties of the general n-trailer , 2001 .