Madhav Patil

Hardware Architecture Review of Swarm Robotics System: Self Reconfigurability, Self Reassembly and Self Replication

Swarm robotics is one of the most fascinating and new research areas of recent decades, and one of the grand challenges of robotics is the design of swarm robots that are self-sufficient. This can be crucial for robots exposed to environments that are unstructured or not easily accessible for a human operator, such as the inside of a blood vessel, a collapsed building, the deep sea, or the surface of another planet. In this paper, we present a comprehensive study on hardware architecture and several other important aspects of modular swarm robots, such as self-reconfigurability, self-replication, and self-assembly.The key factors in designing and building a group of swarm robots are cost andminiaturizationwith robustness, flexibility, and scalability. In robotics intelligence, self-assembly and self-reconfigurability are among the most important characteristics as they can add additional capabilities and functionality to swarm robots. Simulation and model design for swarm robotics is highly complex and expensive, especially when attempting to model the behavior of large swarm robot groups.

Coordinating a heterogeneous robot swarm using Robot Utility-based Task Assignment (RUTA)

The goal of this work is the development of a task-oriented software application that facilitates the rapid deployment of multiple robotic agents. The task solutions are created at run-time and executed by the agents in a centralized or decentralized fashion. Tasks are divided into smaller sub-tasks which are then assigned to the optimal number of robots using Robot Utility Based Task Assignment (RUTA) algorithm. The system deploys these robots using its application program interfaces (APIs) and uploads programs that are integrated with a small routine code. The embedded routine allows robots to configure solutions when decentralized approach is adopted.

UB robot swarm — Design, implementation, and power management

In this paper we describe the hardware architecture of an inexpensive, heterogeneous robot swarm, designed and developed at the RISC lab, University of Bridgeport. Each swarm robot is equipped with sensors, actuators, control and communication units, power supply, and interconnection mechanism. This article also describes the essential features and design of a power distribution and management system for a dynamically reconfigurable system. It further presents the empirical results of the proposed power management system collected with the real robotic applications.

Survey on Decentralized Modular Robots and Control Platforms

Swarm robotics is a relatively new field that has utilized significant progress in the area of multi-agent robotic systems over the last two decades. At times, Swarm robotic systems adopt a decentralized approach in which the desired collective behaviors emerge from local decisions made by robots themselves according to their environment. On the other hand, traditional multi-robot systems basically use centralized communication control in coordinating each robot. The fact that typical swarm of robots consists of relatively simple and homogeneous robots allows the group to self-organize or dynamically reorganize the way individual robots are deployed. Therefore, the swarm approach is considered to be highly robust to the failure of individual robots. The decentralized approach not only addresses the fact that there is a shortage of available software frameworks for distributed control systems/robotics but also introduces system software for controlling multiple expandable and reconfigurable swarm agents. We investigate the behavior of many swarm systems that have been proposed in the literature. In this survey we provide a detailed summary of systems that have been classified under four main categories of the multi-robot system platforms namely; self-reconfigurable, modular, self-replicating, and swarm systems. We present a preliminary taxonomy for swarm robotics and classify existing studies into this taxonomy.

Deployment Environment for a Swarm of Heterogeneous Robots

The objective of this work is to develop a framework that can deploy and provide coordination between multiple heterogeneous agents when a swarm robotic system adopts a decentralized approach; each robot evaluates its relative rank among the other robots in terms of travel distance and cost to the goal. Accordingly, robots are allocated to the sub-tasks for which they have the highest rank (utility). This paper provides an analysis of existing swarm control environments and proposes a software environment that facilitates a rapid deployment of multiple robotic agents. The framework (UBSwarm) exploits our utility-based task allocation algorithm. UBSwarm configures these robots and assigns the group of robots a particular task from a set of available tasks. Two major tasks have been introduced that show the performance of a robotic group. This robotic group is composed of heterogeneous agents. In the results, a premature example that has prior knowledge about the experiment shows whether or not the robots are able to accomplish the task.