Scalable Collaborative Manipulation with Distributed Trajectory Planning

Abstract

We present a distributed algorithm to enable a group of robots to collaboratively manipulate an object to a desired configuration while avoiding obstacles. Each robot solves a local optimization problem iteratively and communicates with its local neighbors, ultimately converging to the optimal trajectory of the object over a receding horizon. The algorithm scales efficiently to large groups, with a convergence rate constant in the number of robots, and can enforce constraints that are only known to a subset of the robots, such as for collision avoidance using local online sensing. We show that the algorithm converges many orders of magnitude faster, and results in a tracking error two orders of magnitude lower, than competing distributed collaborative manipulation algorithms based on Consensus alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM).