A Decentralized, Communication-Free Force Distribution Method With Application to Collective Object Manipulation

We present a novel approach to achieve decentralized distribution of forces in a multirobot system. In this approach, each robot in the group relies on the behavior of a cooperative virtual teammate that is defined independent of the population and formation of the real team. Consequently, such formulation eliminates the need for interagent communications or leader-follower architectures. In particular, effectiveness of the method is studied in a collective manipulation problem where the objective is to control the position and orientation of a body in time. To experimentally validate the performance of the proposed method, a new swarm agent, Dq (Delta-Rho), is introduced. A multirobot system, consisting of five Dq agents, is then utilized as the experimental setup. The obtained results are also compared with a norm-optimal centralized controller by quantitative metrics. Experimental results prove the performance of the algorithm in different tested scenarios and demonstrate a scalable, versatile, and robust system-level behavior.