Modeling and simulation for the Coordination of Two Mobile Robots in Pushing an Object

The theme of this thesis is to construct the dynamic model of a system consisting of two mobile robots pushing an object together, which is followed by the simulation to examine the suitability of the model. In order to move the object along a specified path, a coordination strategy to compute the rotation speeds of the wheels on the robots is designed based on the theory of B-spline curves and geometric constraints. When the robots are pushing the object on the surface, the friction inevitably appears which was traditionally assumed by a uniform distribution. However, such assumption may ignore the effect of frictional torque in some circumstances. In order to solve this problem, we use the basic principle for frictional force, and derive the non-uniform frictional force formula by separating the slender body into small pieces. The friction formula is then included in the dynamical equation which were deduced by applying the reduced Appell’s equation. Simulation results show that the proposed coordination strategy and the dynamical model are feasible and reasonable.