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IMECE 2011-64699 SEMI-AUTONOMOUS COLLABORATIVE CONTROL OF MULTI-ROBOTIC SYSTEMS FOR MULTITASK MULTI-TARGET PAIRING

In many applications, it is required that heterogeneous multirobots are grouped to work on multi-targets simultaneously. Therefore, this paper proposes a control method for a singlemaster multi-slave (SMMS) teleoperator to cooperatively control a team of mobile robots for a multi-target mission. The major components of the proposed control method are the compensation for contact forces, modified potential field based leaderfollower formation, and robot-task-target pairing method. The robot-task-target paring method is derived from the proven auction algorithm for a single target and is extended for multi-robot multi-target cases, which optimizes effect-based robot-task-target pairs based on heuristic and sensory data. The robot-task-target pairing method can produce a weighted attack guidance table (WAGT), which contains benefits of different robot-task-target pairs. With the robot-task-target pairing method, subteams are formed by paired robots. The subteams perform their own paired tasks on assigned targets in the modified potential field based leader-follower formation while avoiding sensed obstacles. Simulation studies illustrate system efficacy with the proposed control method. INTRODUCTION Cooperative control of multi-robotic systems has been studied extensively in recent years [5, 7, 8, 11–13, 15–17], especially for some tasks that cannot be handled by one single robot. It can improve dexterity of robots and enlarge application fields of robots. Thus, many cooperative control algorithms have been proposed so far [5, 7, 8, 11–13, 15–17]. There are two types of cooperation. One is the cooperation without force interactions among robots (unconstrained motion tasks) and the other is with them (constrained motion tasks). In the former type of cooperation, task planning is one of the main technical problems, but the same positional controller as that of single robot can be used and it can be realized very easily. Therefore, this type of cooperation has been practically used for target captures or enclosure [5, 12, 15, 17]. In the latter type of cooperation, under the interactions of forces, design of the control strategies, which can keep inner forces between robots to be desired values and also ensure the stability of the controllers, becomes the most critical problem. This has been seen for target transportations as the force or impedance controller has been commonly used [7,8,16]. Besides these two types of cooperation, the transition between them has been investigated in some papers [11, 13]. The transition involves a smooth, stable switching between motion and force control when instability and large force spikes during the switching are avoided. However, in those papers [11, 13], a control method was not developed to split a robot team into several sub-teams to do the different motion tasks when applications, such as military operation, space exploration, and etc. request all robots to do the multi-motion tasks simultaneously. Furthermore, in many applications, unstructured nature of the worksite environments and the limitations of the current sensors and computer decision-making technologies prohibit the use of fully autonomous systems for the operations [6,8]. Therefore, it is required that the human decision making be involved in the Proceedings of the ASME 2011 International Mechanical Engineering Congress & Exposition IMECE2011 November 11-17, 2011, Denver, Colorado, USA