A novel motion coordination method for variable-sized multi-mobile robots

Abstract

Multi-mobile robot systems (MMRSs) are widely used for transportation in industrial scenes such as manufacturing and warehousing. In an MMRS, motion coordination is important as collisions and deadlocks may lead to losses or system stagnation. However, in some scenarios, robot sizes are different when loaded and unloaded, which means that the robots are variable-sized, making motion coordination more difficult. The methods based on zone control need to first divide the environment into disjoint zones, and then allocate the zones statically or dynamically for motion coordination. The zone-control-based methods are not accurate enough for variable-sized multi-mobile robots and reduce the efficiency of the system. This paper describes a motion coordination method based on glued nodes, which can dynamically avoid collisions and deadlocks according to the roadmap structure and the real-time paths of robots. Dynamic features make this method directly applicable to various scenarios, instead of dividing a roadmap into disjoint zones. The proposed method has been applied to many industrial projects, and this study is based on some manufacturing projects for experiments. Theoretical analysis and experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is effective and efficient.

摘要

多移动机器人系统(MMRS)广泛用于制造业和仓储等工业场景的运输。在MMRS中, 碰撞和死锁可能导致财产损失或系统停滞, 因此运动协同十分重要。然而, 在一些场景中, 机器人尺寸在载货和未载货时是不同的, 即机器人尺寸是变化的, 这使得运动协同更具挑战性。基于区域控制的方法首先需要将环境划分为不相交区域, 然后通过区域的分配静态或动态地进行运动协同。但是, 这种基于区域控制的方法对于变尺寸机器人不够精确, 降低系统效率。因此, 提出一种基于粘连节点的运动协调方法, 可基于路线图和机器人实时路径动态避免碰撞和死锁。粘连节点的动态特性使该方法不必对环境分区即可适用于各种场景。所提方法已应用于多个工业项目, 本文基于一些制造业项目进行实验。理论分析和实验结果表明所提算法是有效和高效的。