Implementation of Integrated Cooperative Robots System for Tight Cooperation

The purpose of this research is to realize a multiple robots system which can be easily developed and managed. In order to perform robust cooperative work, it is necessary that multiple robots can achieve not only a high level of cooperation without communication but also simple cooperation with communication, and then switch between modes according to the situation. We define such kind of cooperation as “Tight Cooperation”. As for the system structure for the Tight Cooperation, we insist that there must be an integrated concept by which both the system of a robot and the entire system can be handled with same concept. Based on this consideration, an object oriented multiple robots system named “ICRoS” (Integrated Cooperative Robot System) is implemented to two hexapod robots with parallel processors. The effectiveness of that system is verified by four kinds of experiments for the cooperative lifting of a box as Tight Cooperation.

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