Conference Papers in Robotics/Dynamics Area

Title: Enhanced Mobility via Cooperation: Analysis and Design

Authors: Deshpande, A. D., and Luntz, J. E.

Abstract:

A team of small, low cost robots instead of one large, complex robot is useful in operations such as search and
rescue, urban exploration etc. However, the performance of such a team is limited due to restricted mobility of
the team members. We propose to overcome the mobility restrictions by physical cooperation among the team
members. We carry out a feasibility analysis of a particular behavior of two robots cooperating to cross a gap
and also consider the effect of the scaling of the robot dimensions. We simulate the dynamic equations describing
the motion which leads to the relaxation the requirements derived from the static analysis. A decentralized
control architecture is designed which avoids continuous communication between the robots thus rendering the
cooperation to be simple and low cost.