Mobile Robots for Collaborative Manipulation over Uneven Ground Using Decentralised Impedance Control

A novel approach to model collaborative mobile robots carrying a shared payload over uneven ground is proposed. This approach considers the manipulators as a 'Passive Suspension' system, utilizing an impedance control law. Detailed modelling and experimental results are presented to support the proposed method. The experiments involve a team of robots traversing various floor disturbances commonly found in industry, which can lead to undesired forces on the shared object. The focus of the results is on how the forces are distributed among the robots in the team. The experiments show that implementing impedance control enables the team to distribute the forces more effectively, reducing stress on the object. However, the performance of the controllers varies across different disturbances due to the passive suspension method not being optimized for any specific use case, which is a limitation discussed in this paper.