A general-purpose hardware robotic platform for swarm robotics

Abstract

Swarm intelligence is based on the recently-acquired notion that sophisticated behaviors can also be obtained from the cooperation of several simple individuals with a very limited intelligence but cooperating together through low-level interactions between them and with the environment using decentralized control and self-organization. Such interactions can lead to the emergence of intelligent behavior, unknown to the individual agents. One of the most remarkable applications of swarm intelligence is swarm robotics, where expensive and sophisticated robots can be replaced by a swarm of simple inexpensive micro-robots. In this context, this paper introduces a general-purpose hardware robotic platform suitable for swarm robotics. With a careful choice of its main components and its flexible and modular architecture, this robotic platform provides support to the most popular swarm intelligence algorithms by hardware. As an illustration, the paper considers four of the most popular swarm intelligence methods; then, it describes the most relevant hardware features of our approach to support such methods (and arguably many other swarm intelligence approaches as well) for swarm robotics.