Millibot-Miniature Mobile Robot Platform for Scalable Swarm Robot Research

Abstract

—Applying control algorithms in a decentralized manner to large-scale robot systems is a growing area of research in swarm robotics. However, due to the manufacturing and installation costs, implementation time, and user operating limitations on large-scale swarm robots, the experiment’s applications in these studies are currently relatively constrained. Most proofs of the algorithm’s viability in these studies end with simulations or implementations on a small number of robots. Following the majority of platforms for swarm robots shown in previous studies, a design of our low-cost small mobile robot platform, the Millibot, which is consistent with those algorithms for mobile robot swarms is introduced in this work. Moreover, in an effort to allow operation easier for users, even when the robot swarm consists of hundreds of individuals, fundamental swarm scalable functions consist of scalable user-assigned power mode, automatic charging and scalable upgrade firmware operation will also be introduced and implemented to swarm of Millibot. The results show that using proposed platform enables users to build and control swarm robots of up to hundreds of individuals.