Multi-agent cooperative transport across partially unknown complex obstacles with online mapping

Cooperative transportation with multiple mobile robots allows carrying out tasks that exceed the capabilities of individual agents. In this paper, we propose a framework that coordinates a team of robots to transport objects via cable-tethering. The framework enables a formation control so that path planning includes (i) payload constraints, (ii) deformation to cross complex obstacles, and (iii) online updates about the environmental changes. The approach has been tested with a team of TurtleBot3 Burger robots in ROS 2, in simulated scenarios, and validated in a real-world environment.