Shape Formation for the Cooperative Transportation of Arbitrary Objects Using Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Cooperative object transportation is essential in numerous domains, including industrial to domestic services. A popular transportation strategy is to carry objects on top of multi-robot systems. The corresponding task is typically solved by decomposing it into three interconnected subproblems: formation control, cooperative navigation, and collision avoidance. A particular challenge posed by real-world objects is their potentially arbitrary shape and non-uniform mass distribution, necessitating robot formations that securely support the object. In this work, we address the challenge of pattern formation control for transporting such real-world objects by proposing a novel multi-agent reinforcement learning approach. Our approach enables a multi-robot system to autonomously position itself underneath an object to support its weight while avoiding obstacles during the formation process. Our evaluations with diverse environments and varying numbers of robots show that our approach leads to policies that reliably produce balanced formations and generalize to cluttered scenes and objects with complex geometry and non-uniform mass distribution.