Selforganizing Robot System
- Cooperation and Selforganization in a Distributed Robot System -
(more images)
Project Objectives
The overall objective of this project is to study the capabilities of a novel
architecture for a self-reconfigurable robot system and to develop a suitable
control software for it. Furthermore an experimental platform for cooperation
between robots in general shall be provided.
The speciality of the architecture is that each entity of the robot system is
a fully autonomous mobile robot but can also establish a mechanical and electronical
connection to other robots. By this several entities can compose themselves to a
a single robot with distributed sensors and actuators and a network of distributed
processors. Together with the ability of each entity to equip itself with an individual
mounting (i.e. a pair of cameras, a gripper, a large power pack or other sensors or
actuators) this system is expected to be extreme flexible in solving a wide range
of tasks in an efficient way.
I also defined a mission to be performed by the system.
System Overview
The base station consists of a PC with some additional hardware for communication with
other the components of the system, recharging connected robots and holding the individual
mountings. The software on the PC includes monitoring and controlling of individual robots
and a command interface for the system as a whole. |