Occlusion-Based Cooperative Transport for Concave Objects with a Swarm of Miniature Mobile Robots

Supervised by: Professor Carlo Pinciroli

Abstract

An occlusion based strategy for collective transport of a concave object using a swarm of mobile robots has been proposed in this paper. We aim to overcome the challenges of transporting concave objects using decentralized approach. The interesting aspect of this task is that the agents have no prior knowledge about the object and do not explicitly communicate with each other. The concept is to eliminate the concavity of the object by filling a number of robots in its cavity and then carry out an occlusion based transport strategy on the newly formed convex object or "pseudo object".