Motion Planning for Cooperative Transportation of a Large Object by Multiple Mobile Robots in a 3D Environment

In this paper, we propose a motion planning method for cooperative transportation of a large object by multiple mobile robots in a 3 dimensional environment. This task has various kinds of problems, such as path planning, manipulation, and so on. All of these problems can’t be solved at once, since computational time is exploded. Accordingly, we divide a motion planner into a local manipulation planner and a global path (motion) planner, and design these two planners respectively. And we integrate two planners. Namely, we aim at integrating a gross motion planner and a fine motion planner. As to the local manipulation planner, we build a manipulation technique, which is suitable for mobile robots by position-control. We compute conditions, in which the object becomes unstable during manipulation, and generate the each robot’s motion considering the robots’ motion errors and indefinite factors from the planning stage. As to the global path planner, we reduce the dimensions of the configuration space (C-space) using the feature of transportation by mobile robots. We can find a solution with searching in this smaller dimensional C-space using the potential field defined in the C-space. And constraints of the object manipulation are considered as the potential function. We verify the effectiveness of our proposed motion planning method through simulations and experiments.