DHPC Adelaide

DHPC Technical Report DHPC-121

An Architecture for Swarm Robots

K.A.Hawick, H.A.James, J.E.Story and R.G.Shepherd

Archived 15 September 2002.

Abstract

The area of collective and cooperative behaviour in swarm robots is an exciting field of study. Recent technological and economic developments have made it possible to build medium to large scale swarms of quite sophisticated mobile robots. We review recent mobile computing technologies and describe our architecture for a swarm of tri-wheeled robots that can exchange information via wireless architecture as well as through their onboard sensors. The main objectives of our system are for educational purposes and as a development platform for an intelligent software middleware to coordinate the activities of a swarm. We also discuss some of the experiments and behavioural goals we are able to study with our system.

Keywords: robot swarm, architecture; mobile computing; wireless communications.

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