A Communication-free Behavior for Docking Mobile Robots

Physical cooperation between robotic agents frequently requires the ability to dock. This paper reports on a reactive docking behavior which uses a vision algorithm that grows linearly with image pixels. The docking behavior was implemented on a marsupial team of robots, where a daughter micro-rover had to re-enter the mother robot from an approach zone with a 2 meter radius and 140° angular width. Experiments showed that the docking behavior had a similar success rate and was faster than 22 teleoperators.