This paper proposed a method of cooperative control of three mobile robots for carrying an object placed on a floor together. Each robot moves to the object independently from its location to a pre-designated location for grasping the object stably. After grasping the common object, the coordination among the robots has been achieved by a master-slave mode. That is, a trajectory planning has been done for the master robot and the distances form the master robot to the two slave robots have been kept constant during the carrying operation. The localization for mobile robots has been implemented using the encoder data and inverse kinematics since the whole system does not have the slippage as much as a single mobile robot. Before the carrying operation, the lifting operations are implemented using the manipulators attached on the top of the mobile robots cooperatively. The real cooperative lifting and carrying operations are implanted to show the feasibility of the master-slave mode control based on the kinematics using the mobile manipulators developed for this research.
In this paper, control software architecture is designed to enable a heterogeneous multiple humanoid robot demonstration executing tasks cooperating with each other. In the heterogeneous humanoid robot team, one large humanoid robot and two small humanoid robots are included. For the efficient and reliable information sharing between many software components for humanoid control, sensing and planning, CORBA based software framework is applied. The humanoid tasks are given in terms of finite state diagram based human-robot interface, which is interpreted into the XML based languages defining the details of the humanoid mission. A state transition is triggered based on the event which is described in terms of conditions on the sensor measurements such as robot locations and the external vision system. In the demonstration of the heterogeneous humanoid team, the task of multiple humanoid cleaning the table is given to the humanoid robots and successfully executed based on the given state diagram.