Coordinated Planning and Control of Two Mobile Robots for Joint Cargo Transportation

Automated cargo transport is a frequent task in intralogistics and industrial scenarios, but is usually carried out by a single robot, thus limited to its payload capabilities. In this paper, we present a method for coordinated motion planning and control of two autonomous mobile robots for the joint transport of cargo that is too large for a single robot. We consider the two robots with a large cargo on top of them as an any-shape single kinematic chain with cargo. We plan an optimal collision free path for the entire differential drive kinematic chain that ensures the transport of the cargo to the desired target location. The implemented algorithm sends control commands to each robot separately, which achieves the coordinated execution of the planned path. Finally, the proposed method is validated in simulated and real-world scenarios.