Low-Complexity Cooperative Payload Transportation for Nonholonomic Mobile Robots Under Scalable Constraints

Cooperative transportation, a key aspect of logisticscyber-physical systems (CPS), is typically approached using dis tributed control and optimization-based methods. The distributedcontrol methods consume less time, but poorly handle and extendto multiple constraints. Instead, optimization-based methodshandle constraints effectively, but they are usually centralized,time-consuming and thus not easily scalable to numerous robots.To overcome drawbacks of both, we propose a novel cooperativetransportation method for nonholonomic mobile robots by im proving conventional formation control, which is distributed, hasa low time-complexity and accommodates scalable constraints.The proposed control-based method is testified on a cable suspended payload and divided into two parts, including robottrajectory generation and trajectory tracking. Unlike most time consuming trajectory generation methods, ours can generatetrajectories with only constant time-complexity, needless of globalmaps. As for trajectory tracking, our control-based method notonly scales easily to multiple constraints as those optimization based methods, but reduces their time-complexity from poly nomial to linear. Simulations and experiments can verify thefeasibility of our method.