Swarm Intelligence for Object Retrieval Applying Cooperative Transportation in Unknown Environments
Ysmaldo Landaez, Hiroshi Dohi, Hitoshi Iba · 2018
Mini-robots have been developed as a way of getting in narrow and critical spaces in order to explore collapsed structures, hazardous places for rescuers to preserve lives. The objective is to distribute the agents on these environments and complete tasks autonomously. The previous methods can accomplish this task only in open spaces or by manually guiding the robots to push the object. In this paper, we propose a novel plug-and-play robot team, where the agents cooperatively push an object towards the destination inside of an unknown environment. Our method consists on adding a guiding process to work together with the Occlusion-Base Pushing (OBP) method. The guiding algorithm establishes sub-goals between the object and the final destination, which helps the robots to push the object through the unknown environment. Based on the results of the simulations performed in V-REP. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method over existing methods in terms of speed and reliability.