This paper presents a motion-planning and control scheme for a cooperative transportation system comprising a single rigid object and multiple autonomous non-holonomic mobile robots. A leader-follower formation control strategy is used for the transportation system in which the object is assumed to be the virtual leader; the robots carrying the object are considered to be followers. A smooth trajectory between the current and desired locations of the object is generated considering the constraints of the virtual leader. In the leader-follower approach, the origin of the coordinate system attached to the centre of gravity of the object, which is known as the virtual leader, moves along the generated trajectory while the real robots, which are known as followers, maintain a desired distance and orientation in relation to the leader. An asymptotically stable tracking controller is used for trajectory tracking. The proposed approach is verified by simulations and real applications using Pioneer P3-DX mobile robots.

Robotic systems are widely used in industry, agriculture, the inspection of infrastructure, and even in our daily lives. The safety and security of robotic systems have become a primary concern as their interaction with humans increases. In this context, attacks on robotic systems have increased for diversified field applications. It is necessary to accurately detect these abnormal events in these systems as soon as possible. However, these systems also need a runtime verification approach on whether they conform to the established specifications. In this study, runtime verification for anomaly detection methods is proposed for the security of the robot operating system (ROS). Firstly, an anomaly detection method is proposed to detect unexpected situations, such as the number of the received packages being decreased under DoS attacks. Then, a holistic runtime verification architecture is proposed for the anomaly detection method. This architecture consists of three major entities: a verification device, an attacker device, and a robotic platform without losing generality. In the verification device, ROSMonitoring and Oracle are used to implement runtime verification. The proposed architecture is verified through an experimental setup. It is shown that the architecture can be used for runtime verification of different anomaly detection algorithms. A discussion on the security of robotic systems is also presented.

This paper presents an approach for the trajectory tracking control of nonholonomic wheeled mobile robots (WMR) by combining one of the existing adaptive control methods and multiple identification models. The overall system includes two types of controllers in the control scheme. A kinematic controller developed by using kinematic model produces the required linear and angular velocities of the robot for tracking a reference trajectory. These required velocities are used to calculate the torques using an adaptive dynamic controller with multiple models. The proposed method uses the multiple models of the WMR for the identification of the dynamic parameters and performs switching between the given models. The models used in the identification are identical, except for the initial estimates of the parameters. By using an adaptive dynamic controller with multiple models of the WMR, enhancement in transient response is obtained. Stability analysis of the overall system is given, and simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effective performance of the adaptive control by using multiple models approach.