Experiment Videos of the Force-Based Non-Prehensile Cooperative Transportation of Objects with Mobile Robots

In particular, the mobile robots shall transport two different polygonal, but non-convex, objects along predefined paths. No central decision entity is employed; the tasks are accomplished in a purely distributed manner using inter-robot communication.

Novelly, the formation synthesis relies on a force-based consideration that explicitly takes into account the physical limitations of the robotic agents. Due to this, if necessary, multiple robots are placed along one edge in order to exert the desired force acting on the object. This is exemplarily shown in the video and demonstrates one crucial advantage compared to purely position-based approaches.