Design and development of an inexpensive aquatic swarm robotics system

Swarm robotics is a promising approach characterized by large numbers of relatively small and inexpensive robots. Since such systems typically rely on decentralized control and local communication, they exhibit a number of interesting and useful properties, namely scalability, robustness to individu...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Costa, V. (author)
Other Authors: Duarte, M. (author), Rodrigues, T. (author), Oliveira, S. (author), Christensen, A. L. (author)
Format: conferenceObject
Language:eng
Published: 2018
Online Access:https://ciencia.iscte-iul.pt/id/ci-pub-28866
Country:Portugal
Oai:oai:repositorio.iscte-iul.pt:10071/16980
Description
Summary:Swarm robotics is a promising approach characterized by large numbers of relatively small and inexpensive robots. Since such systems typically rely on decentralized control and local communication, they exhibit a number of interesting and useful properties, namely scalability, robustness to individual faults, and flexibility. In this paper, we detail the design and development process of a swarm robotics platform composed of autonomous surface robots, which was designed in order to study the use of robotic swarms in real-world environments. Our aquatic surface robots where manufactured using digital fabrication techniques, such as 3D printing and CNC milling, and all hardware and software has been made available as open-source, thus allowing third-parties to customize and further improve our platform.