Optimization driven kinematic control of constrained collaborative mobile agents with high mobility
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Industrial robots, in particular serial industrial manipulators, have enabled a lot of recent research in large scale robotic systems such as used in construction robotics, robotics in architecture. However, industrial manipulators have very low payload to weight ratio, are too generic systems with inflexible hardware and software for task adaptability. High mobility large scale robotic systems often involve even heavier mobile bases to move around these industrial manipulators, thus even further lowering the payload to weight ratio of such systems. Moreover, such system architecture is inflexible and eventually reaches its limits when higher mobility is demanded such as higher overall reach with same payload. This paper presents a concept of constrained collaborative mobile agents where the actuated mobile agents are constrained by a passive kinematic structure whose topology can be inexpensively configured according to different functions, task and mobility requirements. The type and number of mobile agents, the choice of actuation scheme are other important characteristic of this system which can be altered to improve system performance. A novel optimization framework for modeling and kinematic control of such systems is presented which is flexible to the above-mentioned system elements and characteristics. Finally, two prototypes are presented which are used to demonstrate the optimization driven kinematic control of the system with different topologies.
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