Research on Multibody Dynamics and Control for Collaborative Elastic Object Transportation by a Heterogeneous Swarm with Aerial and Land-Based Mobile Robots

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This research project investigates the collaborative transportation of soft objects by a heterogeneous swarm of robots involving land-based as well as aerial robots. Already today, mobile robots are used to accomplish important tasks. However, not employing a single robot, but rather a cooperating swarm of robots can have inherent advantages with respect to performance, robustness to individual robot failures, and flexibility. A heterogeneous swarm brings about even more possible advantages, e.g., land-based robots may be able to transport an object very robustly and efficiently through an environment, but an aerial robot might be necessary to overcome otherwise insurmountable obstacles, giving way to cooperative transportation schemes. In its novelty, the present project poses various challenging research opportunities, including the coordination of the swarm as a whole, the robust propulsion control of the individual robots as well as the control of the robots' manipulators for being able to accurately and cooperatively manipulate soft objects. Those demanding challenges necessitate novel approaches and, therefore, the research and simulative testing of advanced control theoretic concepts, including distributed and information-theoretic model predictive control. Henceforth, the project aims to contribute to an extended set of methodology with respect to the control of robot swarms. To this end, the project includes the mathematical modelling and development of an encompassing control and simulation framework for the considered heterogeneous robot swarm. This enables the simulative research of cooperative transportation tasks, including additionally the hand-over of the transported object from land-based to aerial robots and vice versa.In parallel, to validate the researched approaches deemed promising in simulations, the project aims to develop and conduct hardware experiments in close concordance with the developed integral simulation and control environment. This involves the design of appropriate hardware robots and fitting manipulators as well as the research on suitable methods for sensing, localization, navigation and communication. The close collaboration between the involved research groups, with their expertise in research with real-world and custom-made robotic hardware as well as the control and simulation of mechanical systems, makes it possible to bridge the gap between control theory, simulation and real-world experiments that is often an issue in swarm robotics research. The undertaken research can assume an otherwise unprecedented scope and depth, leading from the mathematical model, control theory and simulation all the way to thorough hardware experiments.