Cooperative Multi-Robot Object Transportation System Based on Hierarchical Quadratic Programming

Formation control gains significant attention in the multi-robot system field as it contributes to a vast range of applications, such as transportation. This letter presents a constrained optimization-based control law for cooperative logistics mission, which consists of rigid shape formation control, group navigation, individual and team obstacle avoidance tasks. These tasks are defined as equality and inequality constraints with different levels of priority. Hierarchical quadratic programming (HQP) approach is used to solve for the optimal solution with an inclusion of velocity limits as inequality constraints to ensure implementation feasibility. Experiment using actual industrial robots is demonstrated in order to validate the theory.