We describe our entry in the AAAI 2002 Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) competition, a marsupial team consisting of a larger wheeled robot and several small legged robots, carried around by the larger robot. This setup exploits complimentary strengths of each robot type in a challenging domain. We describe both the hardware and software architecture, and the on-board real-time mapping which forms...

Inspired by the snake locomotion, modular snake robots have different locomotion capabilities by coordinating their internal degrees of freedom. They have the potential to access restricted spaces where humans cannot go. They can also traverse rough terrains while conventional wheeled and legged robots cannot. Modular robots have other features including versatility, robustness, low-cost, and f...

Robotics is a scientific discipline which needs a high level knowledge in the fields of computer science, as well as electrical and mechanical engineering and high-performance modular control systems. This paper reports the first results of a project that uses a previously developed very small Electronic Platform (Miniboard) for small and simple autonomous mobile robots. This board is used in t...

Body undulation used by snakes and the physical architecture of a snake body may offer significant benefits over typical legged or wheeled locomotion designs in certain types of scenarios. A large number of research groups have developed snake-inspired robots to exploit these benefits. The purpose of this review is to report different types of snake-inspired robot designs and categorize them ba...

A novel distributed hunting approach for multiple autonomous robots in unstructured mode‐free environments, which is based on effective sectors and local sensing, is proposed in this paper. The visual information, encoder and sonar data are integrated in the robot’s local frame, and the effective sector is introduced. The hunting task is modelled as three states: search...

In recent years, a significant development of technologies related to the control and communication mobile robots, including Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, has been noticeable. Developing these requires having necessary hardware software enable prototyping simulation algorithms in laboratory conditions. The article presents Laboratory Intelligent Mobile Robots equipped with latest solutions. equipme...

Collision avoidance is one of the essential pillars of a wheeled robotic system. A wheeled mobile robot (called mobile robot for conciseness henceforth) requires for effective functioning an integrated system of modules for (i) map building, (ii) localization, (iii) exploration, (iv) planning and (v) collision avoidance. Often (i) and (ii) are entailed to be done simultaneously by robots result...