Behaviors for physical cooperation between robots for mobility improvement

— A team of small, low-cost robots instead of a single large, 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 the restricted mobility of the team members. This paper presents the results obtained toward the goal of enhancing mobility of a team of mobile robots by physical cooperation among the robots. Our focus is on the development of the low level system components. Recognizing that small robots need to overcome discrete obstacles, we develop specific analytical maneuvers to negotiate each obstacle where a maneuver is built from a sequence of fundamental cooperative behaviors. The overall goal is to design the mechanisms and the behaviors for mobile robot cooperation such that they can be employed on existing mobile robots with minimal modifications and where interaction takes place via an unactuated link through the use of ground forces rather than an actuated link. We analyze the c...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2007
• Where: AROBOTS
• Authors: Ashish Deshpande, Jonathan E. Luntz
• Keywords: AROBOTS 2007, Mobile Robots, Physical Cooperation, Robots