Safe control for non-prehensile object transportation using a heterogeneous robot team.

Cooperative transportation, whether by homogeneous or heterogeneous teams, extends the
capabilities of individual robots. However, challenges remain in ensuring safe collaboration among
diverse robots in dynamic environments, while also addressing computational complexity and realtime performance constraints. The current literature lacks control frameworks tailored for cooperative
non-prehensile transportation tasks using robots with complementary capabilities. Thus, the main
goal of this research is to develop an innovative control scheme for cooperative transportation tasks,
ensuring the safe and efficient operation of heterogeneous robot teams in dynamic environments.
This involves creating a reference governor framework for safe cooperative control of heterogeneous
robot teams in prehensile transportation of objects, which would exceed the capabilities of a single
robot, extending it to cover non-prehensile transportation tasks with optimization-based control
strategies. The developed scheme will be evaluated in this project for a hetrogenious aerial-ground
robot team, with thorough assessments of effectiveness and feasibility in real-world scenarios. The
anticipated outcomes of this research will provide researchers and engineers with a valuable control
framework for efficient and effective cooperative transportation across various industries, including
manufacturing, logistics, construction, and infrastructure