Collaborative Navigation and Manipulation of a Cable-Towed Load by Multiple Quadrupedal Robots

This letter tackles the problem of robots collaboratively towing a load with cables to specified goal location while avoiding collisions in real time. The introduction (as opposed rigid links) enables robotic team travel through narrow spaces by changing its intrinsic dimensions slack/taut switches cable. However, this is challenging because hybrid mode and dynamical coupling among multiple load. Previous attempts at addressing such were performed offline do not consider obstacles online. In letter, we introduce cascaded planning scheme parallelized centralized trajectory optimization that deals switches. We additionally develop set decentralized planners per robot, which our approach solve collaborative manipulation demonstrate one first autonomy framework able move cable-towed load, too heavy single real-time feedback reactive experiments.