One hot-researched application of multi-robot systems is cooperative object transport, a task in which multiple robots collaboratively move an object that is too larger, bulky or heavy for a single robot. In this letter, we address this problem using the combination of ball-string-ball structure and multi-robot systems, which contributes insight into potential benefits of multi-robot systems working with tools. Compared with state-of-the-art multi-robot object transport approaches, the novelty of our method lies on that the object to be transported is moved by the passive movement of the ball-string-ball structure, rather than mobile robots. We conducted theoretical analysis about the boundary conditions of the transport system and demonstrated the performance of our method by simulations. The results show that our method is scalable with respect to the shapes and sizes of objects, as well as the group size of object cluster.

中文翻译：

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球-串-球结构连接的两个机器人的协作物体运输

多机器人系统的一个热门研究应用是协作物体运输，这是一种由多个机器人协作移动对于单个机器人来说太大、太笨重或太重的物体的任务。在这封信中，我们使用球-串-球结构和多机器人系统的组合来解决这个问题，这有助于深入了解多机器人系统使用工具的潜在好处。与最先进的多机器人物体运输方法相比，我们的方法的新颖性在于，要运输的物体是通过球-串-球结构的被动运动来移动的，而不是移动机器人。我们对运输系统的边界条件进行了理论分析，并通过模拟证明了我们方法的性能。结果表明，我们的方法对于对象的形状和大小以及对象簇的组大小是可扩展的。