Cooperative transport strategy for formation control of multiple mobile robots

This paper addresses a box transport problem that requires the cooperation of multiple mobile robots. A geometric-based distributed formation control strategy is proposed for robots to push the box to the target, which might be static or dynamic. Velocity and hardware constraints are considered in the advanced planning of the trajectory. Information sharing is included because the robots used as box pushers cannot acquire the required environmental information from their local sensors. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed distributed cooperation strategy.