Decentralized control for a team of physically cooperating robots

A team of small low cost robots instead of one big, complex robot is useful in operations such as search and rescue, urban exploration etc. However, the performance of such a team is limited due to restricted mobility of the team members. We propose to overcome the mobility restrictions by physical cooperation among the team members. We carry out a feasibility analysis of a particular behavior of two robots cooperating to cross a gap. We simulate the dynamic equations describing the motion, which leads to the relaxation of the requirements derived from the static analysis. A decentralized control architecture is designed which avoids continuous communication between the robots thus rendering the cooperation to be simple and low cost.