Dynamic Movement Primitives for cooperative manipulation and synchronized motions

Cooperative manipulation, where several robots jointly manipulate an object from an initial configuration to a final configuration while preserving the robot formation, poses a great challenge in robotics. Here, we treat the problem of designing motion primitives for cooperative manipulation such that the robots move in formation and are robust with respect to external disturbances. Individual robot trajectories are generated by Dynamic Movement Primitives (DMPs) and coupled by a formation control approach enabling the DMP-trajectories to preserve a given formation while performing the manipulation. The proposed control scheme achieves an increased adaptability under external disturbances. The approach is evaluated in a full-scale experiment with two prototypical cooperative manipulation and synchronized motion tasks.