Cooperative Modular Transportation of Large and/or Heavy Products – TROCOOL

Autonomous mobile robots are increasingly being used for the autonomous product transportation in logistics scenarios. In fact, they enable a wider range of reactive and flexible behaviors in dynamic routing, as they navigate freely in warehouses. However, the weight of some products requires powerful mobile robots to accomplish the transport task. Furthermore, some products cannot be transported by a single robot. To meet this logistical challenge, one high-potential solution is the use of several mobile robots capable for performing tasks in cooperation. To improve the decision-making process, the product can be made "active". Depending on its characteristics and the environment, it can take decisions (e.g., call on mobile robots useful for its transportation and provide them information). Hence, the considered problem in this project concerns the transportation of a large and/or heavy product within a workshop or warehouse by a modular and cooperative robotic system. By modular, we mean non-holonomic mobile robots controlled
in a distributed way, which will achieve the transportation task in greater or lesser numbers, depending on information provided by the active product. The originality of the solution in this project lies in the cooperative operation of the mobile robots and the active product (e.g., robot matching, trajectory planning for a semi-rigid formation of non-holonomic robots, decentralized estimation of constraints on attachment, decentralized control minimizing information exchanged in the network), which, to our knowledge, is not currently the case in industry.
The work carried out in recent years between the three laboratories (LAMIH, LIS and LIAS) in the consortium has enabled researchers to work together and look forward to this project with confidence.