An undergraduate research platform for cooperative control and swarm robotics

Abstract

Cooperative control is playing increasing important roles in fields as diverse as robotics, computer science, industrial automation, surveillance, economics, biology, and power systems. Cooperative control is directly affected by the communication strategy adopted for exchanging information, which makes the overall system analysis and design complicated. We build a swarm robotic platform that is simple enough for undergraduate students to study cooperative control, yet flexible enough to incorporate complicated control and communication strategies. The robotic platform is a seamless integration of Arduino Uno microcontrollers, iRobot Create 2 which is capable to emulate various holonomous and nonholonomous vehicles, and RF communication modules which are capable of exchanging information with extreme simplicity and low latency.