Research

Cooperative Multiple Manipulator Object Transportation

Robotic systems have become ingrained in manufacturing, remote exploration, and other broad areas that require dirty, dangerous, or dull tasks. Sometimes a single robot is unable to accomplish desired tasks independently without becoming prohibitively large and expensive. Such job includes handling an object that poses additional degrees of freedom, transporting heavy or oversized payload, multipart assembly without a fixture, 3D printing. In those cases, a group of manipulators with/without mobile bases working in cooperation can be advantageous through widened coverage, flexibility, improving redundancy, and fusing information to create improved data products. In general, multi-robot systems refer to a group of fixed/mobile robots with sensing, computation, communication, and actuation capabilities.

Motion Planning of Cooperative Object Transportation

Motion planning of collaborative transportation of large objects by multiple MMRs in a dynamic environment like working aside humans and other robots is a key challenge. An optimization based motion planning method has been proposed for online motion planning in the presence of static and dynamic obstacles subject to system dynamics.