Research on multi-robot coordinated coal transporting in open-air coal mine

To solve the problem of multi-robot coordinated coal transporting in open-air coal mine,a wireless sensor network,composed of control center,wireless gateway and wireless sensors,was presented to control multi-robot.In order to cooperate efficiently,the task finish time was taken as the working efficiency and the efficient optimization based multi-robot task allocation mechanism was proposed.By using ant colony algorithm,the tasks were allocated by the control center and informed to robots via wireless sensor network,so the multi-robot coordinated control was realized.Adapting time difference of arrival(TDOA) based approach,the robot localization was realized by using the localization information provided by wireless sensors.A wireless sensor network was set up,and Pioneer III and Grandar robot was used to simulate multi-robot coordinated coal transporting in open-air coal mine.Simulation results show that this method can realize the multi-robot coordinated control in open-air coal mine,and the robots can finish the tasks cooperatively with the least time.