Distributed planar manipulation in fluidic environments

We present a distributed control strategy that enables a swarm of autonomous surface vehicles (ASVs) to cooperatively grasp and manipulate a large floating object from an initial position and orientation to a desired final position and orientation. Given an initial set of random robot positions, our control strategy enables the team to synchronize their arrival times around the object. Analytical motion trajectories are then computed to enable the swarm to transport the object to the final desired position. We validate the proposed strategy in simulation and present experimental results to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed strategy.

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