Cooperative Behaviour of Mobile Heterogeneous Robots

The use of multiple robots is often suggested to have advantages over single robot systems. At our Institute, we work with a swarm of robots developed by the German computer magazine c't. These Robots have a 12cm-diameter and are 14cm high. Their sensor system consists of two infrared distance sensors, an optical mouse sensor for movement estimation and some infrared reflex light barriers for the measurement of abysses, lines and wheelencoder- ticks. Additionally, our robots are equipped with a color camera including an image processing module and a WLAN adapter for communication. The robots use an ATmega32-microprocessor with 32KB flash program memory, 16MHz clock frequency and 2KB SRAM.

A team of heterogeneous mobile robots

Central research questions are:

• Coordinated Exploration of the Environment
• Multi-Robot Localization
• Vision-Based Self-Localization
• Formation Control
• Swarm Behaviour