Coordination of Multi Robot Systems for Warehouse Automation
Aynala, Anirudh (2021)
Aynala, Anirudh
2021
Master's Programme in Automation Engineering
Tekniikan ja luonnontieteiden tiedekunta - Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences
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Hyväksymispäivämäärä
2021-12-27
Julkaisun pysyvä osoite on
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:tuni-202112209438
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:tuni-202112209438
Tiivistelmä
The recent advancements in robotics have enabled intelligent robotic systems to be deployed in an industrial environment to automate tasks and increase productivity. Mobile robots deployed in a warehouse are usually designed to do tasks individually and do not interact with one another. Although this increases efficiency in the performance of tasks over time, some tasks may be too complicated for a single robot system to accomplish. Multi-robot systems have tremendous potential in automating tasks in logistics and warehouses where robot teams can perform multiple tasks in parallel in less time compared to working individually. The prospect of these multi-robot systems autonomously working in the same environment allows tackling time constraints and dependence on human labour. But, in order to carry packages in a warehouse one of the challenges for the robots is to maintain a rigid formation shape and perform set tasks cooperatively while keeping the whole system safe from static and dynamic entities. In this thesis work, a real-time distributed control algorithm based on control barrier functions for cooperative control of multi-robot systems is presented. The main objective of the controller is to enable a team of robots to maintain a formation while avoiding obstacles and other robot formations present in their way and reaching their goal. The proposed controller has been verified and its performance evaluated through various scenarios in both simulations and physical mobile robots.