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. We demonstrate the designed collaborative trolley transportation system through practical transportation tasks, and the experiment results reveal their effectiveness and reliability in complex and dynamic environments.

翻译：利用多个机器人协同搬运物体在控制与机器人学文献中已有深入研究，但现有方法大多仅适用于全向移动机器人，或缺乏完整且可实时运行的导航与决策框架。本文提出一种基于非完整自主机器人的多机器人系统，以及用于协同行李推车运输的端到端分层自主框架。该框架能够规划运动学可行路径、在线计算运动方案，并提供反馈机制，使多机器人系统在处理长列行李推车、绕行障碍物及行人时，能够应对多重固有关联且复杂的约束条件。我们通过实际运输任务对设计的协同推车运输系统进行了验证，实验结果表明其在复杂动态环境中具有有效性和可靠性。