Cooperative Overhead Transportation of a Box by Decentralized Mobile Robots

We demonstrated that the regular behavior-based architecture can be used to control decentralized multiple robots on a tightly-coupled task. With carefully designed behaviors, the robots can work cooperatively and effectively. We divided the behaviors into two types: individual behaviors and group behaviors. Group behaviors, embedded as layers in the behavior-based architecture, act as a mechanism to induce coordination and synchronization among robots. The tightly-coupled task that we use as our testbed is the cooperative overhead transportation of a box, in which two robots have to carry a box over their tops. Little movement error will result in a fall of the box. The result illustrated the validity of the proposed method. The robots can move the box to a goal without falling down with a success rate of 80%.