Transportation of a large object by small mobile robots with handcarts and outrigger

In this paper, we report on our efforts to transport a large object by small mobile robots in a home or office environment. Given such an environment, robots must be compact. We improved the transport capacity of small mobile robots using a handcart. However, there were two problems faced: the risk of a slip and fall under the influence of the reaction force when the robot handles the object, and the slipping of the handcart as the robot stacks an object on it. To address slipping, we gave the robot the ability to press a nonskid board on the floor with respect to both the robot and handcart when necessary. To prevent the robot from falling, the moment is counteracted with a device similar to an outrigger, which is often used in mobile work vehicles. We constructed a prototype of the system to implement the proposed method, and confirmed its effectiveness by performing a transport experiment.

[1]  Vijay Kumar,et al.  Cooperative Towing with Multiple Robots , 2008, WAFR.

[2]  Gabriel Ramírez-Torres,et al.  Motion Planning for Cooperative Multi-robot Box-Pushing Problem , 2008, IBERAMIA.

[3]  Jun Ota,et al.  Motion Planning for Two Robots of an Object Handling System Considering Fast Transition Between Stable States , 2012, Adv. Robotics.

[4]  Jonathan Fink,et al.  Cooperative Towing With Multiple Robots , 2008 .

[5]  Ralf Dörner,et al.  Accuracy in optical tracking with fiducial markers: an accuracy function for ARToolKit , 2004, Third IEEE and ACM International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality.

[6]  Oussama Khatib,et al.  Mobile manipulation: The robotic assistant , 1999, Robotics Auton. Syst..

[7]  Kazuhiro Kosuge,et al.  A car transportation system by multiple mobile robots - iCART - , 2008, 2008 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[8]  Qingguo Li,et al.  Manipulation of Convex Objects via Two-agent Point-contact Push , 2007, Int. J. Robotics Res..

[9]  Kazuhiro Kosuge,et al.  Handling of an object by multiple mobile manipulators in coordination based on caster-like dynamics , 2004, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2004. Proceedings. ICRA '04. 2004.

[10]  T. Arai,et al.  Cooperative Manipulation of Objects by Multiple Mobile Robots with Tools * , 1998 .

[11]  Bruce Randall Donald,et al.  Moving furniture with teams of autonomous robots , 1995, Proceedings 1995 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems. Human Robot Interaction and Cooperative Robots.

[12]  Kazuhiro Kosuge,et al.  Coordinated transportation of a single object by multiple mobile robots without position information of each robot , 2000, Proceedings. 2000 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2000) (Cat. No.00CH37113).

[13]  Tamio Arai,et al.  A quantitative stability measure for graspless manipulation , 2002, Proceedings 2002 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No.02CH37292).

[14]  Jun Ota,et al.  Transportation of a large object by small mobile robots using hand carts , 2012, 2012 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Biomimetics (ROBIO).

[15]  H. Osumi,et al.  Firm standing of legged mobile manipulator , 2003, 2003 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No.03CH37422).

[16]  Jun Ota,et al.  Fast grasping of unknown objects through automatic determination of the required number of mobile robots , 2013, Adv. Robotics.

[17]  Bruce Randall Donald,et al.  Distributed manipulation of multiple objects using ropes , 2000, Proceedings 2000 ICRA. Millennium Conference. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation. Symposia Proceedings (Cat. No.00CH37065).