Socially-Mediated Negotiation for Obstacle Avoidance in Collective Transport

In this paper, we present a novel method for performing collective transport in the presence of obstacles. Three robots are physically connected to an object to be transported from a start to a goal location. The task is particularly challenging because the robots have a heterogeneous perception of the environment. In fact, the goal and the obstacles can be perceived only by some of the robots. Hence, the task requires appropriate negotiation of the direction among the robots. We developed a novel negotiation strategy in order to tackle this challenge. We perform experiments in simulation. In the experiments, we analyze efficiency in an environment with only one obstacle, and robustness in an environment with several obstacles.