Design And Implementation Of Swarm Robots System And Research On Cooperation

The study on cooperative control of multiple mobile robots has emerged as a new challenging research topic in recent years. There are two major research directions occured in previous studies: collective robotics and metamorphic robotics, but both of them have defects. The former are multiple undifferentiated intelligent robots working with each others but they can not be combined into a whole system. The latter is a whole in itself, and the internal modules lack flexibility. In this paper, a new Multi-agent robot system named Swarm Robots was proposed to solve the above two deficiencies with self-organizing and self-assembly function.The design and implementation of Swarm Robots have been analyzed and researched in this paper. The mechanical structure of S-Bot was introduced and a practical hardware and software design was bringed forward. Leader-Follower formation control algorithm was studied and improved in this paper. The design was innovated in modular expansion of hardware, flexible updates of decision-making system in order to adapt to the changing needs of mission, and improving control stability of Leader-Follower formation.A modular expansion hardware system was designed and implemented, which include Swarmcore platform based in ARM9 and other expansion functional modules based in AVR. The foundation was laid for the future's heterogeneous design. The embedded control software system was designed by top-down design method. The structure of Swarm Robots software system was modular designed. Programed and implemented the IIC module, WiFi communication mudule and color visual processing module. Control strategy module was programmed by Python script in order to meet the demand for flexibility.Leader-Follower formation control algorithm was improved, and been validated in Player/Stage platform. Experimental results proved the effectiveness of the improved algorithm and control strategies. Test of the S-Bot's software and hardware was accomplished, and the test reaults proved that real-time and reliability was well able to meet the design requirements.