Development of Affordable and Powerful Swarm Mobile Robot Based on Smartphone Android and IOIO board

Abstract

Nowadays, an approach for coordinating large numbers of autonomous robots, which is called as swarm robots, has becoming an important issue in robotics research. In swarm robot systems, each robot must cooperate with other robots in order to perform a given task. The main obstacle in swarm robot research is the cost of making robots. Building one robot with limited capabilities commonly has to spend substantial amount of money and certainly making robots for intelligent systems research need much more investment. In this paper, we would like to present the development of affordable mobile robot, but also having powerful capabilities and intelligence. The mobile robot is specifically designed and made to be used as a stand-alone or in swarm robot systems. It is essential that the mobile robot has learning ability to adapt the dynamic environments. Furthermore, for swarm robot systems, each mobile robot must be able to communicate with other robots in order to coordinate each other. In our research, we used differential drive model for mobile robot locomotion and then apply the model through Android smartphone based controller. The mobile robot was constructed by using two actuators on the right and left side, and one castor wheel which has no steering system and can move freely. The differences velocity between left and right actuators determines the direction and final position of the mobile robot. The angular velocity of two main actuators is set by Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) parameter in IOIO board microcontroller. In our experiment, we showed that the capability of our robot in performing several movement tasks. We are sure that Android based robotic platforms are ideal candidates for affordable robotics for swarm robot system research.