A Miniature Mobile Robot With a Color Stereo Camera System for Swarm Robotics Research

In swarm robotics research, instead of using large size robots, it is often desirable to have multiple small size robots for saving valuable work space and making the maintainance of the robots easier. Also, the implementation costs of a miniature robot is lower because of simpler mechanical design. In this paper, we present a novel modular miniature mobile robot designed for swarm robotics research. The sensor set of the robot includes a color stereo camera system with two CMOS cameras and DSP, allowing each robot to do sophisticated stereo image processing on-board. The modular design permits the addition of new modules into the system. The modules communicate using three serial buses (SPI, I2C, and UART), which enable flexible, adaptive, and fast inter-module data exchange. The robot is developed for swarm robotics research with the aim to provide a low-cost and low-power miniature mobile robot with capabilities typically found only in large size robots.