Autonomous Multiple-Trolley Collection System with Nonholonomic Robots: Design, Control, and Implementation

Autonomous Multiple-Trolley Collection System with Nonholonomic Robots: Design, Control, and Implementation

16 Jan 2024 | Peijia Xie†, Bingyi Xia†, Anjun Hu, Ziqi Zhao, Lingxiao Meng, Zhirui Sun, Xuheng Gao, Jiankun Wang, and Max Q.-H. Meng
This paper presents an autonomous multi-trolley collection system designed for airports and other dynamic public spaces. The system consists of two nonholonomic robots: a Detector robot and a Collector robot. The Detector robot searches for and manipulates individual trolleys, while the Collector robot maintains a queue of trolleys and docks them together. The key contributions include: 1. **System Design**: An integrated autonomy framework that includes a cost-effective hardware design, robust perception, dynamic motion planning, and optimization-based control. 2. **Lightweight Manipulator and Docking Mechanism**: A lightweight manipulator with limited degrees of freedom (DoF) and a docking mechanism optimized for sequential stacking and transportation of multiple trolleys. 3. **Vision-Based Control**: A novel vision-based control method using Control Lyapunov Function (CLF) and Control Barrier Function (CBF) in Quadratic Programming (QP) to ensure accurate and efficient trolley collection. 4. **Real-World Demonstration**: Successful execution of multiple-trolley collection tasks in real-world scenarios, demonstrating the system's effectiveness and safety. The paper also discusses the challenges in trolley collection, such as dynamic environments and complex contact interactions, and addresses these through innovative mechanical design and control strategies. The experimental results show that the proposed system outperforms existing methods in terms of success rate and control precision, particularly in challenging scenarios.This paper presents an autonomous multi-trolley collection system designed for airports and other dynamic public spaces. The system consists of two nonholonomic robots: a Detector robot and a Collector robot. The Detector robot searches for and manipulates individual trolleys, while the Collector robot maintains a queue of trolleys and docks them together. The key contributions include: 1. **System Design**: An integrated autonomy framework that includes a cost-effective hardware design, robust perception, dynamic motion planning, and optimization-based control. 2. **Lightweight Manipulator and Docking Mechanism**: A lightweight manipulator with limited degrees of freedom (DoF) and a docking mechanism optimized for sequential stacking and transportation of multiple trolleys. 3. **Vision-Based Control**: A novel vision-based control method using Control Lyapunov Function (CLF) and Control Barrier Function (CBF) in Quadratic Programming (QP) to ensure accurate and efficient trolley collection. 4. **Real-World Demonstration**: Successful execution of multiple-trolley collection tasks in real-world scenarios, demonstrating the system's effectiveness and safety. The paper also discusses the challenges in trolley collection, such as dynamic environments and complex contact interactions, and addresses these through innovative mechanical design and control strategies. The experimental results show that the proposed system outperforms existing methods in terms of success rate and control precision, particularly in challenging scenarios.
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