Cooperative Object Transport by Two Robots Connected With a Ball-String-Ball Structure

One hot-researched application of multi-robot systems is cooperative object transport, a task in which multiple robots collaboratively move an object that is too larger, bulky or heavy for a single robot. In this letter, we address this problem using the combination of ball-string-ball structure and multi-robot systems, which contributes insight into potential benefits of multi-robot systems working with tools. Compared with state-of-the-art multi-robot object transport approaches, the novelty of our method lies on that the object to be transported is moved by the passive movement of the ball-string-ball structure, rather than mobile robots. We conducted theoretical analysis about the boundary conditions of the transport system and demonstrated the performance of our method by simulations. The results show that our method is scalable with respect to the shapes and sizes of objects, as well as the group size of object cluster.