Cooperative transport of a buoyant load: A differential geometric approach

We present a differential geometric approach towards the synthesis of cooperative controllers for a team of autonomous surface vehicles transporting a buoyant load. We are interested in cooperative transport of large objects by teams of autonomous surface vehicles (ASVs) operating in marine and littoral environments. We consider the cooperative towing problem where individual ASVs connected to a load via cables must coordinate to transport the load along a desired trajectory. We present a differential geometric approach towards the synthesis of open and closed loop strategies for the team. The main advantage of the proposed strategy is the ability to synthesize agent-level controllers that can simultaneously satisfy all the holonomic and non-holonomic constraints within the system. We validate the approach in both simulations and experiments.

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