Design and validation of a centimeter-scale robot collective

Though many advances have been made in the field of multi-agent robotic swarms, most results are limited to computer simulations instead of actual implantation to a robotic system. A primary factor limiting the development, testing, and validation of decentralized algorithms for large-scale multi-robot teams is the high cost of the available systems. A low budget but highly flexible platform could create a foundation that would allow researchers to evaluate their control algorithms under real world constraints. This paper presents Spider-Bots, a low cost and versatile platform for testing and validating control algorithms for multi-robot swarms. The system is consisted of centimeter-scale mobile robots that can communicate wirelessly and interact with their environment, along with simple and easy to use software libraries. Once completed, the platform was validated by executing three distinct algorithms: Waypoint navigation, object manipulation, and collision avoidance.