Abstract
Consider two omnidirectional robots carrying a ladder, one at each end, in the plane without obstacles. Given start and goal positions of the ladder, what is a time-optimal motion of the robots subject to given constraints on their kinematics such as maximum acceleration and velocity? Using optimal control theory, Chen, Suzuki and Yamashita solved this problem under a kinematic constraint that the speed of each robot must be either 0 or a given constant v at any moment during the motion. Their solution, which requires complicated calculation, is centralized and off-line. The objective of this paper is to demonstrate that even without the complicated calculation, a motion that is sufficiently close to time-optimal can be obtained using a simple distributed algorithm in which each robot decides its motion individually based on the current and goal positions of the ladder.
This paper has been prepared as a summary of a presentation given at the 1998 Dagstuhl Workshop on the authors’ on-going research project. This work was supported in part by a Scientific Research Grant-in-Aid from the Ministry of Education, Science and Culture of Japan under Grants, the National Science Foundation under Grant IRI-9307506, the Office of Naval Research under Grant N00014-94-1-0284, and an endowed chair supported by Hitachi Ltd. at Faculty of Engineering Science, Osaka University.
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Asahiro, Y., Asama, H., Fujita, S., Suzuki, I., Yamashita, M. (1999). Distributed Algorithms for Carrying a Ladder by Omnidirectional Robots in Near Optimal Time. In: Christensen, H.I., Bunke, H., Noltemeier, H. (eds) Sensor Based Intelligent Robots. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 1724. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/10705474_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/10705474_13
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