Development of a Miniature Robot for Swarm Robotic Application

Abstract

Abstract-Biological swarm is a fascinating behavior of nature that has been successfully applied to solve human problem especially for robotics application. The high economical cost and large area required to execute swarm robotics scenarios does not permit experimentation with real robot. Model and simulation of the mass number of these robots are extremely complex and often inaccurate. This paper describes the design decision and presents the development of an autonomous miniature mobile-robot (AMiR) for swarm robotics research and education. The large number of robot in these systems allows designing an individual AMiR unit with simple perception and mobile abilities. Hence a large number of robots can be easily and economically feasible to be replicated. AMiR has been designed as a complete platform with supporting software development tools for robotics education and researches in the Department of Computer and Communication Systems Engineering, UPM. The experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of using this robot to implement swarm robotic applications.Index Terms-Autonomous, AMiR, Swarm intelligent, Low-cost, Platform, Education. I. INTRODUCTIONRobots are increasingly being integrated into working tasks to replace humans. They are currently used in many fields of applications including office, military tasks, hospital operations, industrial automation, security systems, dangerous environment and agriculture [1]. Several types of mobile robots with different dimensions are designed [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9] for various robotic applications. The autonomous swarm mobile robot is a strategy to provide a robust and flexible robotics system by exploiting a large number robot [10,11]. This strategy allows coordination of simply physical robot to cooperatively execute a single global task. Each individual robot in the swarm should have an autonomous behavior without any human intervention. The economic cost problem are often associated with swarm applications due to the large number of robots required (>100 unit). The design of AMiR has considered this issue and due to its small size, experiment could be conducted cost effectively in a small working area.Commercial robot manufacturers provide various robotics solutions and accessories for teaching, research and development [12, 13]. However, the associated cost and expandability of the robot architecture is a concern. Nearly all commercial robots does not have suitable development environment to implement swarm scenarios. Although the size of AMiR is small (6cm x 7.3cm x 4.7cm), it has been equipped with required modules such as perception, locomotion and communication. Additional small peripheral can be designed and connected as a stackable extension board with simple communication scheme.Jasmine [14, 15] is a robot platform designed specifically to implement swarm applications. Although the details of the designs are available, Jasmine is designed as a micro-robot in the size of less then 3cm cube. Hence, it could not be easily reproduced without incurr...

Comparison of Different Cue-Based Swarm Aggregation Strategies

“…2 (a) is an open hardware mobile robot platform [20]. AMiR is specifically developed for swarm robotics studies.…”

Colias-Φ: An Autonomous Micro Robot for Artificial Pheromone Communication

“…In addition, we can attach a color RGB sensor when we need to implement different types of messages in pheromone system. Table I shows the specification of Colias-Φ and two previously developed mobile robots, Colias [22] and AMiR [23]. …”

Colias: An Autonomous Micro Robot for Swarm Robotic Applications

“…Motion/Speed Size Autonomy Colias £25 distance, light, bump, bearing, range wheel, 35 cm/s 4 cm 1-3 h AMiR [5] £65 distance, light, bearing wheel, 10 cm/s 6.5 cm 2 h Alice [6] N/A distance, camera wheel, 4 cm/s 2.2 10 h Jasmine [7] £80 distance, light, bearing wheel , N/A 3 cm 1-2 h E-puck [8] £580 distance, camera, bearing, accele, mic wheel, 13 cm/s 7.5 cm 1-10 h Kobot [9] £800 distance, bearing, vision, compass wheel , N/A 12 cm 10 h Kilobot [10] £75 distance, light vibration, 1 cm/s 3.3 cm 3-24 h R-one [11] £220 light, IR, gyro, bump, accelerometer wheel, 30 cm/s 10 cm 6 h SwarmBot [12] N/A range, bearing, camera, bump wheel, 50 cm/s 12.7 cm 3 h Table 1. Comparison of some swarm robotics platforms…”

“…Its method of motion reduces its use on various surfaces. We previously developed AMiR (Autonomous Miniature Robot) [5] as a low-cost open-hardware platform for swarm applications. It uses IR sensors for distance estimation and short-range communication.…”