Multi-Robot Manipulation with no Communication Using Only Local Measurements

This paper presents a novel approach to coordinate the manipulation forces of a group of robots without explicit communication during a cooperative manipulation task. Robots use the measurements of the motion of the object as the only information to reach a consensus on their forces. It is proven that the consensus can be reached even if all the robots have different velocity and acceleration measurements since they take measurements at different attachment points around the object while the object is rotating and translating. The convergence of the leader-following process where a leader robot actively steers the forces of all follower robots to navigate the object along a desired trajectory is also proven with Lyapunov stability arguments. We verify our method in both numerical simulations and a physics simulator, where we transport a grand piano with 1001 robots.