Distributed grasp synthesis for swarm manipulation with applications to autonomous tugboats

— Assume a swarm of mobile robots is in the act of transporting a large object in the plane, by applying unilateral forces to the perimeter of that object. We address the question of where a new robot, joining the group, should establish contact with the object to maximally improve the manipulation capabilities of the swarm. Inspired by the literature on multi-fingered hands, we synthesize a grasp by incrementally optimizing a grasp quality function. We adapt the quality function in several important ways to accommodate the distributed nature of the swarm problem. We show that the objective function is quasiconcave, which has important implications for uniqueness and scalability of the solution; and present a solution methodology. We apply the resulting framework to the example of a large swarm of autonomous tug boats towing a barge, taken from our larger research program.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: ICRA
• Authors: Joel M. Esposito
• Keywords: Grasp Quality Function, ICRA 2008, Quality Function, Robotics, Swarm