Group Of Robot Coordinated Control Research Oriented Prototype System Design

Swarm robots are one of artificial swarm systems consisted of manyautonomous mobile robots having relative simple structures and functions, beingcharacteristic of distributed functions, distributed space and distributed time, etc.Also, those member robots are homogenous both in their abilities and roles.Thus the researches on swarm robotics are usually conducted in a theoreticalanalysis or/and experimental simulation fashion. Being one of standardproblems in swarm robotics, swarm robotic search is always viewed as abenchmark tested for cooperative control over swarm robots. This thesis focuseson a swarm robotic prototype system design, supported by the national naturalscience fund project “Swarm Robotic Search-Oriented Extended Particle SwarmOptimization (EPSO) Model and Its Applications”(Approved No.60975074).The major contributions have been made as follows:1. Exploring requirements for all logical units in swarm robotic controlsystem within the framework of swarm intelligence method, we analyzedemands on functions of hardware and software for EPSO model instantiated. Inaddition, the needed abilities of member robot are determined according to theprinciples of distributed space and distributed functions.2. As for the limited ability demand on member robot in environmentalsensing, related type selection is designed both in photoelectric encoder andelectronic compass used for robot states detection as well as in sound sensorused for target signals intensity measuring based on the existing configuration ofinternal and external sensors of AS-UIII robot in our lab.3. Considering the requirement for self-localization of member robot inworking space, we develop a series of algorithms for dead reckoningimplementation using internal sensors of robot including photoelectric encoderand electronic compass.4. As for the requirement for local interactions between member robots, wedesign sub-communication system by means of ZigBee-based low speed and short distance transmission wireless communication network based on IEEE802.15.4protocol stack.5. From mechanism of intelligence emerged from limited sensing and localinteractions, we analyze the functional requirements for monitoring computersystem designed simultaneously to decide three-level architecture includingphysical resource layer, logical scheduling layer, and opening application layer,based on the existing resources configuration of robot in our lab.Having hardware integrated and algorithm developed above, the EPSOmodel is instantiated finally so that swarm robotic search experiments can beconducted for functions test. Results from experiments show that the bottleneckof resources is broken by resources calling cross different platforms of ARM andPC, which makes related basic researches on cooperative control over swarmrobotic system performed possible.