Velocity Potential Field Modulation for Dense Coordination of Polytopic Swarms and Its Application to Assistive Robotic Furniture

Abstract

We explore the use of a mobile furniture swarm that are intended to assist users with limited mobility in their daily indoor activities. We focus on the multi-robot coordination problem when a dense target pose configuration is required, such as in an apartment setting. In those cases, the convergence of one robot to the target can be significantly affected by neighboring robots with specific shapes. In this letter, we propose a solution, named Velocity Potential Field Modulation (VPFM), to deal with the dense coordination problem of a polytopic swarm in a decentralized manner. We adapt our method to assistive applications, such as room reconfigurations and facilitating indoor movement of wheelchair users. We evaluate the performance of our method in simulations and on real-world mobile furniture hardware, demonstrating its effectiveness and real-time performance.