Distributed and cooperative system of micro robots with command delivery

For the purpose of investigating the practical control of distributed and cooperative system, a prototype model of command deliverable micro robots has been designed. This system consists of ten autonomous disk shape robots with 54 mm diameter and being of commercial parts. Each of them having a pair of 4-bit command transmitter and receiver is controlled by the programmable 8-bit CPU. All robots are programmed either to start or to stop the same operations with mutual command delivery by setting a robot which transmits start or stop command into the working area. After receiving the start command, each robot starts randomly to run by a pair of stepping motors, catches scattered fragments with the front pocket and cleans out them from the working area. Monitoring the signals from three sets of sensors, a robot can sense the catch of a fragment, the working area and head-on collisions with each other. In this study, the availability of the command delivery method for the autonomous distributed system is examined. It was found that it was possible to develop more intelligent systems, although the communication and operation of this system was very simple