A solution for collective object transport using air-ground multirobot teams

A study conducted by our researcher Tatsuya Miyano, assigned to Toyota Research Institute of North America (TRINA) in collaboration with the Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of California, Irvine was published in the IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology. This study was conducted in cooperation with Frontier Research Center of Toyota Motor Corporation.

It is important and challenging to find the optimal assignment for transporting multiple objects by aerial/ground robot teams. In this study, we revealed the local optimality criteria for this combinatorial problem based on M-convexity, and proposed an efficient algorithm that provides the globally optimal solution of the problem. Numerical experiments demonstrated the performance on practical problems. The proposed algorithm is expected to be useful in designing collective object transport services for the factory and logistics.

Title: Globally Optimal Assignment Algorithm for Collective Object Transport Using Air–ground Multirobot Teams
Authors: Miyano, T., Romberg, J., Egerstedt, M.
Journal Name: IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology
Published: July 13, 2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/TCST.2023.3291880