Mobile robot teamwork for cooperated task

When plural robots exist in the same workspace, first we have to decide robots in order to accomplish some tasks. There have been a lot of works that report how to control robots in cooperation, but there have been few works that report how to decide robots to be used. In this paper, a method for deciding a team of mobile robots is described. The aim of the team is to carry load in minimum working time. Working time is depend on some elements - distance between robot and load, torque a robot can output, maximum velocity and acceleration of robot, condition of robot, and so on. Each element as described above is named "ability" in this paper. For deciding a team, that is combination of robots, ability gaps in mobile robots are considered. Taking account of the ability gaps, a method for calculation of working time is described. To curtail the time of calculation and obtain a combination efficiently, genetic algorithm is introduced. Simulation and experiment result is shown to confirm the effectiveness of the method described in this paper.