Deformable caging formation control for cooperative object transporation by multiple mobile robots

This paper addresses the problem of multi-robots object transportation by using the concept of object closure. In contrast to form or force closure used, object closure is a condition under which the object is trapped so that there is no feasible path for the object from the given position to any position that is beyond a specified threshold distance. Once object closure is achieved, the robots can cooperatively drag or flow the trapped object to the desired goal. In this paper, the object closure margin used to decide the caging formation is addressed and a decentralized control algorithm to perform a large object handling by controlling the density of robots in the caging formation is proposed