Semi-Autonomous Collaborative Mobile Robot System for Material Handling

摘要

Since multi-robots collaboration has outstanding advantages, it is becoming increasingly common to have multiple robots working together for material transport, cooperative assembly, etc. Therefore, autonomous mobile robots need to know their own positions within the environment, and the positions of other robots and moving objects in order to complete their tasks individually or in a cooperative way. However, it is not an easy job to accurately estimate the robot's own position, because the information that robots receive through their sensors is inherently uncertain, and the control over their actuators is also inaccurate. For these reasons, this paper proposes a vision scheme that determines the locations and orientations of decentralized cobots (collaborative robots) in real time. Moreover, the system avoids possible collisions through artificial potential fields in such a way that the transportation of objects and the concurrent execution of tasks are done efficiently in addition guaranteeing the scalability.