Swarm robotics is one the most fascinating, new research areas in the field of robotics, and one of it's grand challenge is the design of swarm robots that are both heterogeneous and self-sufficient. This can be crucial for robots exposed to environments that are unstructured or not easily accessible for a human operator, such as a collapsed building, the deep sea, or the surface of another planet. In Swarm robotics; self-assembly, self-reconfigurability and self-replication are among the most important characteristics as they can add extra capabilities and functionality to the robots besides the robustness,
flexibility and scalability. Developing a swarm robot system with heterogeneity and larger
behavioral repertoire is addressed in this work. This project is a comprehensive study of the hardware architecture of the homogeneous robot swarm and several problems related to the important aspects of robot's hardware, such as: sensory units, communication among the modules, and hardware components. Most of the hardware platforms used in the swarm robot system are homogeneous and use centralized control architecture for task completion. The hardware architecture is designed and implemented for UB heterogeneous robot swarm with both decentralized and centralized control, depending on the task requirement. Each robot in the UB heterogeneous swarm is equipped with different sensors, actuators, microcontroller and communication modules, which makes them distinct from each other from a hardware point of view. The methodology provides detailed guidelines in designing and implementing the hardware architecture of the heterogeneous UB robot swarm with plug and play approach. We divided the design module into three main categories - sensory modules, locomotion and manipulation, communication and control. We conjecture that the hardware architecture of heterogeneous swarm robots implemented in this work is the most sophisticated and modular design to date
