Abstract
In this work we present the hardware architecture of a mobile heterogeneous robot swarm, designed and implemented at the Interdisciplinary Robotics, Intelligent Sensing and Control (RISC) Laboratory, University of Bridgeport. Most of the recent advances in swarm robotics have mainly focused on homogeneous robot swarms and their applications. Developing and coordinating a multi-agent robot system with heterogeneity and a larger behavioral repertoire is a great challenge. To give swarm hardware heterogeneity we have equipped each swarm robot with different set of sensors, actuators, control and communication units, power supply, and an interconnection mechanism. This paper discusses the hardware heterogeneity of the robotic swarm and its challenges. Another issue addressed in paper is the active power management of the robotic agents. The power consumption of each robot in the UB robot swarm is calculated and the power management technique is also explained in this paper. We applied this heterogeneous robot swarm to perform three sample tasks – Mapping task, human rescue task and wall painting task.
Highlights
The Swarm robotics has been an emerging research paradigm over the last decade, inspired by group behavior animals including ants, bees, and other insects [1]
In this work we have outlined the drawbacks of the existing swarm hardware architectures and offer new innovative techniques for more efficient systems
Most existing systems are homogeneous in nature composed of the same type robotic agents
Summary
The Swarm robotics has been an emerging research paradigm over the last decade, inspired by group behavior animals including ants, bees, and other insects [1]. Most existing swarm robot systems have been designed and implemented with homogeneous hardware. The swarm-bot research project [5], deals with design and implementation of swarm robots (s-bots) with self-organizing and self-assembling capabilities, but each S-bot is physically identical (homogeneous) and uses the same kind of sensors, actuators, microcontrollers. Swarm-bots have been extended into a swarmanoid project, which is focused on the study, design and implementation of swarm systems with heterogeneous robots [6]. In this case, a swarm includes robots that can move on the ground, fly, and climb on vertical surface.
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