HeRoSwarm: Fully-Capable Miniature Swarm Robot Hardware Design With Open-Source ROS Support

Experiments using large numbers of miniature swarm robots are desirable to teach, study, and test multi-robot and swarm intelligence algorithms and their applications. To realize the full potential of a swarm robot, it should be capable of not only motion but also sensing, computing, communication, and power management modules with multiple options. Current swarm robot platforms developed for commercial and academic research purposes lack several of these critical attributes by focusing only on a few of these aspects. Therefore, in this paper, we propose the HeRoSwarm, a fully-capable swarm robot platform with open-source hardware and software support. The proposed robot hardware is a low-cost design with commercial off-the-shelf components that uniquely integrates multiple sensing, communication, and computing modalities with various power management capabilities into a tiny footprint. Moreover, our swarm robot with odometry capability with Robot Operating Systems (ROS) support is unique in its kind. This simple yet powerful swarm robot design has been extensively verified with different prototyping variants and multi-robot experimental demonstrations

From a Competition for Self-Driving Miniature Cars to a Standardized Experimental Platform: Concept, Models, Architecture, and Evaluation

Context: Competitions for self-driving cars facilitated the development and research in the domain of autonomous vehicles towards potential solutions for the future mobility. Objective: Miniature vehicles can bridge the gap between simulation-based evaluations of algorithms relying on simplified models, and those time-consuming vehicle tests on real-scale proving grounds. Method: This article combines findings from a systematic literature review, an in-depth analysis of results and technical concepts from contestants in a competition for self-driving miniature cars, and experiences of participating in the 2013 competition for self-driving cars. Results: A simulation-based development platform for real-scale vehicles has been adapted to support the development of a self-driving miniature car. Furthermore, a standardized platform was designed and realized to enable research and experiments in the context of future mobility solutions. Conclusion: A clear separation between algorithm conceptualization and validation in a model-based simulation environment enabled efficient and riskless experiments and validation. The design of a reusable, low-cost, and energy-efficient hardware architecture utilizing a standardized software/hardware interface enables experiments, which would otherwise require resources like a large real-scale test track.Comment: 17 pages, 19 figues, 2 table

Analysis and Observations from the First Amazon Picking Challenge

This paper presents a overview of the inaugural Amazon Picking Challenge along with a summary of a survey conducted among the 26 participating teams. The challenge goal was to design an autonomous robot to pick items from a warehouse shelf. This task is currently performed by human workers, and there is hope that robots can someday help increase efficiency and throughput while lowering cost. We report on a 28-question survey posed to the teams to learn about each team's background, mechanism design, perception apparatus, planning and control approach. We identify trends in this data, correlate it with each team's success in the competition, and discuss observations and lessons learned based on survey results and the authors' personal experiences during the challenge

Autonomous construction using scarce resources in unknown environments: Ingredients for an intelligent robotic interaction with the physical world

The goal of creating machines that autonomously perform useful work in a safe, robust and intelligent manner continues to motivate robotics research. Achieving this autonomy requires capabilities for understanding the environment, physically interacting with it, predicting the outcomes of actions and reasoning with this knowledge. Such intelligent physical interaction was at the centre of early robotic investigations and remains an open topic. In this paper, we build on the fruit of decades of research to explore further this question in the context of autonomous construction in unknown environments with scarce resources. Our scenario involves a miniature mobile robot that autonomously maps an environment and uses cubes to bridge ditches and build vertical structures according to high-level goals given by a human. Based on a "real but contrived” experimental design, our results encompass practical insights for future applications that also need to integrate complex behaviours under hardware constraints, and shed light on the broader question of the capabilities required for intelligent physical interaction with the real worl

Safe, Remote-Access Swarm Robotics Research on the Robotarium

This paper describes the development of the Robotarium -- a remotely accessible, multi-robot research facility. The impetus behind the Robotarium is that multi-robot testbeds constitute an integral and essential part of the multi-agent research cycle, yet they are expensive, complex, and time-consuming to develop, operate, and maintain. These resource constraints, in turn, limit access for large groups of researchers and students, which is what the Robotarium is remedying by providing users with remote access to a state-of-the-art multi-robot test facility. This paper details the design and operation of the Robotarium as well as connects these to the particular considerations one must take when making complex hardware remotely accessible. In particular, safety must be built in already at the design phase without overly constraining which coordinated control programs the users can upload and execute, which calls for minimally invasive safety routines with provable performance guarantees.Comment: 13 pages, 7 figures, 3 code samples, 72 reference

Smart Camera Robotic Assistant for Laparoscopic Surgery

The cognitive architecture also includes learning mechanisms to adapt the behavior of the robot to the different ways of working of surgeons, and to improve the robot behavior through experience, in a similar way as a human assistant would do. The theoretical concepts of this dissertation have been validated both through in-vitro experimentation in the labs of medical robotics of the University of Malaga and through in-vivo experimentation with pigs in the IACE Center (Instituto Andaluz de Cirugía Experimental), performed by expert surgeons.In the last decades, laparoscopic surgery has become a daily practice in operating rooms worldwide, which evolution is tending towards less invasive techniques. In this scenario, robotics has found a wide field of application, from slave robotic systems that replicate the movements of the surgeon to autonomous robots able to assist the surgeon in certain maneuvers or to perform autonomous surgical tasks. However, these systems require the direct supervision of the surgeon, and its capacity of making decisions and adapting to dynamic environments is very limited. This PhD dissertation presents the design and implementation of a smart camera robotic assistant to collaborate with the surgeon in a real surgical environment. First, it presents the design of a novel camera robotic assistant able to augment the capacities of current vision systems. This robotic assistant is based on an intra-abdominal camera robot, which is completely inserted into the patient’s abdomen and it can be freely moved along the abdominal cavity by means of magnetic interaction with an external magnet. To provide the camera with the autonomy of motion, the external magnet is coupled to the end effector of a robotic arm, which controls the shift of the camera robot along the abdominal wall. This way, the robotic assistant proposed in this dissertation has six degrees of freedom, which allow providing a wider field of view compared to the traditional vision systems, and also to have different perspectives of the operating area. On the other hand, the intelligence of the system is based on a cognitive architecture specially designed for autonomous collaboration with the surgeon in real surgical environments. The proposed architecture simulates the behavior of a human assistant, with a natural and intuitive human-robot interface for the communication between the robot and the surgeon

Classification and Management of Computational Resources of Robotic Swarms and the Overcoming of their Constraints

Swarm robotics is a relatively new and multidisciplinary research field with many potential applications (e.g., collective exploration or precision agriculture). Nevertheless, it has not been able to transition from the academic environment to the real world. While there are many potential reasons, one reason is that many robots are designed to be relatively simple, which often results in reduced communication and computation capabilities. However, the investigation of such limitations has largely been overlooked. This thesis looks into one such constraint, the computational constraint of swarm robots (i.e., swarm robotics platform). To achieve this, this work first proposes a computational index that quantifies computational resources. Based on the computational index, a quantitative study of 5273 devices shows that swarm robots provide fewer resources than many other robots or devices. In the next step, an operating system with a novel dual-execution model is proposed, and it has been shown that it outperforms the two other robotic system software. Moreover, results show that the choice of system software determines the computational overhead and, therefore, how many resources are available to robotic software. As communication can be a key aspect of a robot's behaviour, this work demonstrates the modelling, implementing, and studying of an optical communication system with a novel dynamic detector. Its detector improves the quality of service by orders of magnitude (i.e., makes the communication more reliable). In addition, this work investigates general communication properties, such as scalability or the effects of mobility, and provides recommendations for the use of such optical communication systems for swarm robotics. Finally, an approach is shown by which computational constraints of individual robots can be overcome by distributing data and processing across multiple robots