Micro Autonomous Robot Systems (MARS): Coordination and control of multiple micro robots

In this paper, we present the design of our small robot MARS (Micro Autonomous Robotic System) and basic experiments on coordination of group behavior. MARS is a small mobile autonomous robot. The robot has sensors, actuators, CPU, battery, and infrared communication device. The robot can get a program from the host computer through the wireless communication system. Moreover, the robot can exchange information with the other robot through the wireless communication system. Here we propose a method to coordinate and control the group behavior based on the immune network algorithm. Using this platform, we tried the basic experiments, such as following light and gathering. We succeeded in generation of the simple group behavior of tracking the object by the proposed method.