A distributed approach for autonomous cooperative transportation in a dynamic multi-robot environment

This paper describes a distributed approach for autonomous cooperative transportation in a dynamic multi-robot environment. The proposed approach forms an optimal coalition at runtime for cooperative transportation and assigns a group of robots for the task. Explicit communication is used to acquire information as the robots do not have a global knowledge of the environment, i.e., no robot knows the location and state of another robot. For cooperative transportation, such information is essential as objects may arrive at any time and at any location. The proposed approach deals with on-demand missions, where the number of robots required to solve the problem is not known a priori. The applicability of the approach is demonstrated on a road clearance scenario in a realistic urban search and rescue simulation environment. The experimental results validate the correctness of the approach.