Project
Selforganizing Robot System
- Mission -
Although the project's main purpose is the investigation of the system concept's power, a concrete mission is very useful to serve as test environment and allows a more straight and focused development.The real world scenario, chosen because it allows the demonstration of the system's special capabilities, is the preparation of a foreign area (e.g. another planet) for human settlement. This consists of the exploration of the landing point's environment to find a suitable location for an outpost that is subsequently to be mounted there.
For the actual mission to be accomplished by the system some sub-tasks are greatly simplified to make it achievable with the limited time and financial resources, while keeping the main aspects:
- The foreign area is the local office environment while the test area is additionally limited by taped borderlines on the ground.
- Randomly placed colored markings on the ground support the navigation.
- The base station represents the landing position.
- The outpost consists of nodes ans rods that can be mounted to any rectangular grid structure.
Initial Condition
Initially all robots are close to or even connected to the base station. After
switching on they all perform an automatic calibration procedure to bring them
in a functional state. All required mountings are placed in rack modules.
The minimally required set of mountings consists of: two W-Lan Mountings, two
battery packs, two camera pairs, four grippers and two transporters.
Exploring the Environment
After initialization the robots have to equip themselves with the required mountings to explore the environment. A suitable strategy is to form groups of two to three robots where each group consists of a camera pair, a W-LAN module and optionally - to increase the working time - a battery pack.
The above described formation allows the system to perform a distributed but coordinated exploration of the environment. Each group can stay in touch with the base station and continously transmit the latest map information. Once a groupd found the marking of the suitable outpost location all robots regroup at the base station.
Mounting The Outpost
To transport the outpost parts and the mountings required for mounting the outpost to the outpost location all robots equip themselves with their assigned mounting and form a long convoy where the front robot needs to have a camera pair to guide the other robots with the previously generated map to the destination. This group needs to consist of ate least two transporters, four grippers and one camera pair. Additional W-LAN, battery pack and camera mountings could improve the performance.
Arrived at the the destination the robots form groups of two grippers and one
transporter between them with optionally addtional battery pack and/or W-LAN.
Within these groups they can start to mount segments of the outpost which
requires no complex sensory due to their mechanical connection and the
selfcentering shapes of the grippers and outpost parts.
To maintain the power supply a camera-equipped robot could group with a battery
pack-equipped robot and perform a kind of shuttle connection to the base
station.
To join the previously mounted segements there are two possible strategies:
Either both groups couple and determine their relative positions by the
connector's positions or they get support by one to two camera mounted robots
that place themselves at a suitable position to allow the extraction of this
information from the video data for which the outpost parts could have colored
markings. The first approach might not work due to too large accumulated errors
in a longer chain of robots.
When the outpost should have more than one layer the robots have to put segments
on top of each other. With the support of a camera module they could keep the
lower segment just laying on the ground which allows more robots to lift the upper
segment providing more power and, thus, enabling them to build higher outposts.
Optional Extensions
There are several extensions to the system imaginable:- Initially some (or all) outpost parts are laying on the ground so they need to be pick up from the ground and loaded on the transpor.
- Unmounting the outpost and loading the parts back on the transporter.
- A robot-trailer that can also hold a mounting as the robots but has no drive and only minimal electronics just enough to allow a coupling with robots and the base station.
- Determine the opbimal outpost's shape depending on various parameters like the space around the location marker.