Collaborative Trolley Transportation System with Autonomous Nonholonomic Robots

Abstract-- Cooperative object transportation using multiple robots has been intensively studied in the control and robotics literature, but most approaches are either only applicable to omnidirectional robots or lack a complete navigation and decision-making framework that operates in real time. This paper presents an autonomous nonholonomic multi-robot system and an end-to-end hierarchical autonomy framework for collaborative luggage trolley transportation. This framework finds kinematic-feasible paths, computes online motion plans, and provides feedback that enables the multi-robot system to handle long lines of luggage trolleys and navigate obstacles and pedestrians while dealing with multiple inherently complex and coupled constraints. Robots are versatile tools for object manipulation and In this paper, we present a practical multi-robot system transportation [1], and have a broad range of applications, along with a hierarchical navigation framework for the task including industry assembly lines [2], vehicle extraction [3], of transporting a series of luggage trolleys with autonomous and luggage collection at airports [4], [5], etc. Two nonholonomic robots that were previously used the movement of large objects requires the coordination of in our trolley collection work [5] are further adapted and multiple robots for enhanced strength or mobility.