LAUSR

Formation control is a potential advanced technology for aircrafts, spacecrafts and space robots. This paper, for the first time, studies several methods of passive and semi-active Remote Center Compliance (RCC) in order to examine their effects on formation control of a group of Wheeled Mobile Robots (WMRs) for object manipulation during space/terrestrial explorations. To this end, first, the dynamics model of the constrained non-holonomic robots, object and RCC system have been derived precisely. A leader-follower control strategy is then utilized for trajectory tracking of the desired path by the cooperative robots. Finally, the passive and semi active RCC are optimized to make the formation robust in the presence of significant disturbances. The results obtained reveal that the semi-active RCC system, combined with a PID controller, reduces the effect of the disturbances experienced as compared to the other passive RCC modules.