Distributed Motion Generation for Two Omni-Directional Robots Carrying Ladder

The problem of e ciently moving a pair of omni directional robots carrying a ladder using distributed control is discussed We rst consider the case in which two robots that may di er only in their maximum speeds are situated in an obstacle free workspace and present two distributed algorithms Next a distributed algorithm is presented for the case in which the workspace is a narrow corridor with a degree corner and two robots are chosen from a large pool of robots having di erent characteristics in terms of the maximum speed path generation strategy sensitivity to the motion of the other robot etc The e ectiveness of the algorithms is evaluated using computer simulation Finally we present an outline of a distributed control scheme based on heuristic search that can potentially be used for more complex situations involving a larger number of robots in a workspace cluttered with obstacles