UB Swarm: Hardware Implementation of Heterogeneous Swarm Robot with Fault Detection and Power Management

In this work we present the hardware architecture of a mobile heterogeneous robot swarm, designed and implemented at the Interdisciplinary Robotics, Intelligent Sensing and Control (RISC) Laboratory, University of Bridgeport. Most of the recent advances in swarm robotics have mainly focused on homogeneous robot swarms and their applications. Developing and coordinating a multi-agent robot system with heterogeneity and a larger behavioral repertoire is a great challenge. To give swarm hardware heterogeneity we have equipped each swarm robot with different set of sensors, actuators, control and communication units, power supply, and an interconnection mechanism. This paper discusses the hardware heterogeneity of the robotic swarm and its challenges. Another issue addressed in paper is the active power management of the robotic agents. The power consumption of each robot in the UB robot swarm is calculated and the power management technique is also explained in this paper. We applied this heterogeneous robot swarm to perform three sample tasks – Mapping task, human rescue task and wall painting task. Copyright © Research Institute for Intelligent Computer Systems, 2015. All rights reserved.