Libot: Design of a low cost mobile robot for outdoor swarm robotics

Abstract

Robot fabrication has always been a costly matter. Even for educational purposes, one will need to spend substantial amount of money for building single robot with limited capabilities. When it comes to development of higher capabilities and intelligence, more investment will be required. In this paper, we present details of a mobile robot that is specially designed and made to be used as a stand-alone or in a swarm of robots. This robot can navigate outdoor autonomously based on a digital compass, GPS module and a transceiver module to communicate with other robots and a base station as research work in swarm robotics is mainly based on two way communication. Using the same onboard transceiver module, certain limited modifications to this robot would be needed for indoor navigation using wireless sensor networks.