SWARM-BOT: from concept to implementation

Author

Mondada, Francesco ; Guignard, André ; Bonani, Michael ; Bär, Daniel ; Lauria, Michel ; Floreano, Dario

Author_Institution

Autonomous Syst. Lab, Swiss Fed. Inst. of Technol., Lausanne, Switzerland

Volume

2

fYear

2003

fDate

27-31 Oct. 2003

Firstpage

1626

Abstract

This paper presents a new robotic concept, called SWARM-BOT, based on a swarm of autonomous mobile robots with self-assembling capabilities. SWARM-BOT takes advantage from collective and distributed approaches to ensure robustness to failures and to hard environment conditions in tasks such as navigation, search and transportation in rough terrain. One SWARM-BOT is composed of a number of simpler robots, called s-bots, physically interconnected. The SWARM-BOT is provided with self-assembling and self-reconfiguring capabilities whereby s-bots can connect and disconnect forming large flexible structures. This paper introduces the SWARM-BOT concept and describes its implementation from a mechatronic perspective.

Keywords

mechatronics; mobile robots; multi-robot systems; robust control; self-adjusting systems; SWARM-BOT; autonomous mobile robots; mechatronic perspective; navigation; rough terrain; selfassembling capabilities; Bridges; Buildings; Flexible structures; Mobile robots; Navigation; Paper technology; Prototypes; Robotic assembly; Robustness; Wheels;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Intelligent Robots and Systems, 2003. (IROS 2003). Proceedings. 2003 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on

Print_ISBN

0-7803-7860-1

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/IROS.2003.1248877

Filename

1248877