Iterative Transportation Planning of Multiple Objects by Cooperative Mobile Robots

This paper focuses on a planning method for an iterative transportation task by cooperative mobile robots. This task requires the generation of appropriate robot paths and the formation of groups of cooperating robots. In order to realize an efficient transportation, a planning architecture consisting of “path-generation layer” and “strategy-making layer” is proposed. The former layer generates robot paths from global environmental information and produces a graph network from the derived robot paths. In the latter layer, every robot learns a behavior strategy based on the derived graph. An asymptotic strategy-making method is used here. Simulation results indicate the effectiveness of the proposed architecture.

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