A novel semi-coupled hierarchical motion planning framework for cooperative transportation of multiple mobile manipulators

Abstract Multiple mobile manipulators ( MMs ) show superiority in the tasks requiring mobility and dexterity compared with a single robot, especially when manipulating/transporting bulky objects. However, closed-chain of the system, redundancy of each MM , and obstacles in the environment bring challenges to the motion planning problem. In this paper, we propose a novel semi-coupled hierarchical framework ( SCHF ), which decomposes the problem into two semi-coupled sub-problems. To be specific, the centralized layer plans the object’s motion first, and then the decentralized layer independently explores the redundancy of each robot in real-time. A notable feature is that the lower bound of the redundancy constraint metric is ensured, besides the closed-chain and obstacle-avoidance constraints in the centralized layer, which ensures the object’s motion can be executed by each robot in the decentralized layer. Simulated results show that the success rate and time cost of SCHF outperform the fully centralized planner and fully decoupled hierarchical planner significantly. In addition, cluttered real-world experiments also show the feasibility of the SCHF in the transportation tasks. A video clip in various scenarios can be found at https://youtu.be/Y8ZrnspIuBg .