| Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha) |
ASAHIRO Yuichi Kyushu Univ., Dept.of Computer Science and Communication Engi-neering, Research, システム情報科学研究科, 助手 (40304761)
ASAMA Hajime The Institute of Physical and Chemical Research (RIKEN), Division of Instrumenta, 生化学システム研究室, 先任研究員 (50184156)
FUJITA Satoshi Hiroshima Univ., Dept.of Electrical Engineering, Associate Professor, 工学部, 助教授 (40228995)
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| Research Abstract |
Many research institutes are intensively working on projects of autonomous robot systems because of their applicability to practical and important tasks both in usual and extreme situations. In au- tonomous robot systems, there is no leader robot that controls the other robots. To complete some tasks in such a system, each robot has to decide own action individually by observing the other robots.
We focused on the marching problem which is one of the basic cooperation problems. Intuitively speaking, in an autonomous robot system, the quality of cooperative actions depends on the knowledge that the robots share. For a simple example, let us consider a problem in which robots try to form a line. If the robots have knowledge on some coordinate system, they can easily form a line by deciding that one end of the line is at the origin and the line is on the x-axis. However, if they do not share the knowledge, the problem becomes exceedingly harder. Therefore, we studied on knowledge which rob
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ots can acquire individually, especially sharing a coordinate system.
We worked on a cooperation problem carrying a ladder by two omnidirectional mobile robots. We developped a distributed algorithm for this problem and evaluated it by computer simulation. Fur- thermore in our simulation, the algorithm succeeds carrying an n-polygon by n robots. This problem can be considered as a simple version of the marching problem, in which the formation of the robots is fixed physically. For the next step, extending the above results will give us ideas on the marching problem : Even if they do not carry an object in practice, they can pretend to be carrying it by ap- pending some functions which consider the effects from a "virtual" object, i.e., they can march without objects.
The algorithm will be implemented to the physical robot system RIKEN developped. A preliminary experiment was done. We tested the performance of the feedback control of two robots being connected by a ladder. Although the modules which handles the ladder have force sensors, the feedback control did not work well. The reason is that since the robots were directly connected the required response Less
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