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Home Project Selforganizing Robot System- Base Station -Shortcuts: Hardware, SoftwareOn the one hand the base station provides a comfortable graphical user interface for a human operator to monitor and control all aspects of the whole system. On the other hand it is also the place where the robots can recharge their powerpack and get or change their individual mounting. Graphical User InterfaceOn a 3D view the user can see all robots with their current state and the environment as far as it is already explored. By clicking on a robot it is possible to gather more details of the robot's state especially all current sensor data. A remote control dialog allows the operator to control the motion of the robot directly. The command interface allows to give commands to the system as a whole. This might be done by choosing an entry from a list of predefined commands, like exploring the environment. Alternatively it should also be possible to define completely new tasks, i.e. by specifying the desired state of the environment. In what way this can be formulated depends on the AI-system that will be implemented on the robots.Recharge StationThe recharge station is a single connector with the same shape as those mounted to the robots. It doesn't need the lock mechanism since only other robots will connect to it and one lock mechanism is sufficient to ensure a reliable connection. To simplify the establishing of connection the connector might be slightly passivly movable to compensate misalignments. The sensory that is necessary to allow or support establishing a connection still needs to be investigated. A convex mirrow that allows the robot to determin the posistion of the recharge station just with the IR sensory of its connector might even be sufficient.The only purpose of the corresponding electronics is to translate the LVDS based data from the robots to a media that can be connected to the PC. USB2.0 might be a good choice but is not settled yet. Tool StackThe tool stack holds the individual mountings for the robots. Except a lock mechanism to guarantee a reliable bidirectional exchange of the mounting between robot and tool stack no actuators should be neccessary since the robots provide already all required degrees of freedom. A modular design where one module can hold one mounting and several moduls can be attached easily to each other. Similar to the connector of the recharge station each module should allow passively a motion. Again the required sensory still needs to be investigated.The connection between mounting and tool stack needs to provide the power supply for those components of the electronics that are necessary for a datatransfer to enable a programming and also a recharging voltage for power packs. HardwareDevelopment State
SoftwareDevelopment State
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