In this paper, a navigation method is proposed for cooperative load-carrying mobile robots. The behavior mode manager is used efficaciously in the navigation control method to switch between two behavior modes, wall-following mode (WFM) and goal-oriented mode (GOM), according to various environmental conditions. Additionally, an interval type-2 neural fuzzy controller based on dynamic group artificial bee colony (DGABC) is proposed in this paper. Reinforcement learning was used to develop the WFM adaptively. First, a single robot is trained to learn the WFM. Then, this control method is implemented for cooperative load-carrying mobile robots. In WFM learning, the proposed DGABC performs better than the original artificial bee colony algorithm and other improved algorithms. Furthermore, the results of cooperative load-carrying navigation control tests demonstrate that the proposed cooperative load-carrying method and the navigation method can enable the robots to carry the task item to the goal and complete the navigation mission efficiently.
Keywords: artificial bee colony algorithm; cooperative carrying; evolutionary robot; fuzzy control; grouping strategy; interval type-2 neural fuzzy controller; navigation control; wall-following control.