Planar Pushing Manipulation with a Group of Mobile Robots

This paper addresses the problem of collaborative manipulation of an object performed by a group of robots. In particular, the objective is achieved by means of pushing, implemented by a group of small wheeled mobile robots. The proposed method exploits the well known Voronoi-based coverage control method to deploy the robots in the environment according to a given probability density function. The shape of such a density function is defined, in a time varying manner, by a pushing policy function to enable planar manipulations, considering only the footprint of the manipulated object. The proposed method is validated by means of extensive simulations and real world scenario experiments with different sized robot groups and different manipulated objects.