Development of a miniature robot for swarm robotic application

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

Development of IR-based short-range communication techniques for swarm robot applications

This paper proposes several designs for a reliable infra-red based communication techniques for swarm robotic applications. The communication system was deployed on an autonomous miniature mobile robot (AMiR), a swarm robotic platform developed earlier. In swarm applications, all participating robots must be able to communicate and share data. Hence a suitable communication medium and a reliable technique are required. This work uses infrared radiation for transmission of swarm robots messages. Infrared transmission methods such as amplitude and frequency modulations will be presented along with experimental results. Finally the effects of the modulation techniques and other parameters on collective behavior of swarm robots will be analyzed