Linked multi-component mobile robots: Modeling, simulation and control

The Linked Multi-Component Robotic Systems (L-MCRS) consists of a group of mobile robots carrying a passive uni-dimensional object (a hose or a wire). It is a recently identified unexplored and unexploited category of multi-robot systems. In this paper we report the first effort on the modeling, control and visual servoing of L-MCRS. Modeling has been tackled from geometrical and dynamical points of view. The passive element is modeled by splines, and the dynamical modeling is achieved by the appropriate extension of Geometrically Exact Dynamic Splines (GEDS). The system's modeling allows realistic simulation, which can be used as a test bed for the evaluation of control strategies. In this paper we evaluate two such control strategies: a baseline global controller, and a fuzzy local controller based on the observation of the hose segment between two robots. Finally, we have performed physical experiments on a team of robots carrying a wire under a visual servoing scheme that provides the perceptual information about the hose for the fuzzy local controller. Visual servoing robust image segmentation is grounded in the Dichromatic Reflection Model (DRM).