Multi-object Transportation using a Mobile Robot

The use of automated robot systems in many different contexts and applications has increased significantly in recent years. A prominent application area is the transport of objects, which has applications to simple cases of moving objects in a home environment as well as in more complex scenarios, such as in search and rescue missions or commercial warehouses. In this work we propose a methodology which deals mainly with the path planning and execution stage of the entire problem. Considering the presence of many objects in the environment, the objective is to minimize the time to get all objects to their goal positions and reduce the distance traveled by the robot. The problem is modeled as a graph problem, where a path is decomposed into segments and the robot dynamically selects in a greedy manner the best to be executed in a certain time. Numerous simulations considering a ground robot were conducted in order to provide a thorough evaluation and validation of the methodology. The experiments showed the effectiveness of the technique in comparison to a simple sequential approach.