TROCOOL
The problematic of this project concerns the movement or transport within a workshop or warehouse of a bulky and/or heavy product by a modular and cooperative robotic system.
Autonomous mobile robots are increasingly being used to automate product transport operations in logistics scenarios. In fact, they extend the scope of reactive and flexible behavior in dynamic routing, as they navigate freely in warehouses.
However, the weight of some products requires powerful robots to accomplish the transport task. In addition, some products cannot be transported by a single robot. To meet this logistical challenge, one solution with great potential is the use of several mobile robots capable of 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 make decisions, (e.g. soliciting mobile robots useful for its transport and providing them with information).
.Thus, the problematic of this project concerns the movement or transport within a workshop or warehouse of a bulky and/or heavy product by a modular and cooperative robotic system.
By modular, we mean non-holonomic mobile robots controlled in a distributed way which, depending on the information from the active product, will intervene in greater or lesser numbers.
The originality of the solution in this project lies in the cooperative operation of the mobile robots and the active product (e.g., robot pairing, trajectory generation for a semi-rigid formation of non-holonomic robots, decentralized estimation of constraints exerted on attachment points, decentralized control minimizing information exchanged in the network), which, to our knowledge, is not currently the case in industry.