A MULTIROBOT SYSTEM FOR DISTRIBUTED SENSING

Abstract

This paper presents a modular multirobot system developed for distributed sensing experiments. The multirobot system is composed of modular small size robots, which have various sensor capabilities including a color stereo camera system and an infrared based sensor for the relative pose estimation. The paper describes the current state of the multirobot system introducing the robots, their sensor capabilites, and some initial experiments conducted with the system. The experiments include a distributed laser based 3-D scanning experiment involving two robots, and an experiment where a group of robots arrange into a spatial formation and measures the distributions of light and magnetic field of the environment. The experiments demonstrate how a multirobot system can be used in a meaningful way to extract information from the environment, and how they can cooperatively perform tasks, like 3-D scanning, which is a difficult task for a single small size robot due to limitations of current sensing technologies. The 3-D scanning experiment also demonstrates how the multirobot system’s inherent properties, i.e. spatial distribution and mobility, can be utilized in a novel way to create distributed measurement devices in which each robot has an role as a part of the device, and in which the mobility of the robots provides flexibility to the structure of the measurement system.