Design And Implementation Of Swarm Robots

Swarm Robotics, which is an intersecting subject of robotics and swarm intelligence, has developed very fast in recent years. Compared to traditional robot, swam robots system based on swarm intelligence is better in self-organization, scalability and robustness. The desired complicated behavior is not designed but emerges from a mass of simple behavior of robots. Without a central node in a swarm robots system, more robots in a system always means better performance. Even a lot of nodes break down, the remained robots are able to finish their task. So it is a fundamental task to design a swarm robots system which is suit for swarm algorithm.The first half of this paper proposes an overall architecture of swam robots system and implements some important modules. This swarm robots system can be applied to explore maze, form a queue and gather around information source now. These tasks demonstrate scalability and robustness of our robot system.A swarm robots system consists of a lot of robots. How to develop and test algorithm on many robots is a big problem. The second half of this paper present a wireless updating system which update many programs in one time. It will save a lot of time for algorithm developer. The paper's main achievements include:1. Propose architecture of a swarm robot. Swarm robots will be used to complete some mission which is difficult for human. But different mission require different hardware. For example, robot needs to be equipped with a camera to find his target. In maze exploring mission, infrared sensor is necessary. How to deal with different demands of environment is my concern.2. Implement some fundamental modules. Based on the architecture of our swarm robots, I have implemented some fundamental modules such as movement module, communication module, etc. In this paper, I will discuss some details about these modules.3. Design a wireless updating system for large scales robots. To accelerate design and test of swarm algorithm on swarm robots system, I have designed and implemented a wireless updating system. This system consists of a comparison algorithm between different version codes and a reliable communication protocol. Developer can update many programs on robots in one time.4. Introduce some relevant tools to develop swarm robots algorithm. This paper is focus on design and implementation of a swarm robots system. Some relevant issues and solutions will be elaborated too. Some tasks will demonstrate the feasibility and efficiency of our system at the end of paper.