Event-Driven Decentralized Control for Multi-Robot Cooperative Manipulation

In this work, we present a decentralized, event-driven control architecture for collaborative rigid object manipulation using omnidirectional wheeled mobile robots. Unlike fixed manipulators, mobile manipulation requires complex coordination between robots, making robustness and fault tolerance critical. Our framework is implemented in ROS2, in which each robot operates independently, with control, kinematic, and motor nodes that communicate via structured message passing. This decentralized design enhances fault tolerance, as individual component failures do not compromise the entire system. To enable perception, an ArUco-based vision system is employed to estimate robot and object poses, supporting the execution of three coordinated subtasks: approaching, grasping, and transporting. The proposed scheme is validated in a Gazebo simulation through different experiments, in which two robots successfully manipulate individual cubes or a beam. Results demonstrate that the proposed event-driven, decentralized control strategy enables consistent coordination, fault-tolerant operation under agent failures, and successful task execution in collaborative manipulation scenarios.