Depicting pathways for cooperative miniature robots using Cellular Automata

One of the major tasks in the field of robotics is the path planning problem. In systems consisted of numerous robots, the creation of collision free trajectories be comes even more complex. Such robotic teams must avoid all detected obstacles while further tasks must be achieved such as forming specific patterns. In this paper, a Cellular Automaton (CA) based path planner and its implementation in a real cooperative robot team are presented. All robots must cover the same distance avoiding all detected obstacles while their formation is kept immutable. Due to its simplicity, the method has low computational load and therefore further applications could be applied. On the other hand, miniature robots can cooperate in order to perform area measurements, simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), panoramic images and so on. One of the most interesting cooperation aspects is the usage of multiple digital cameras, usually found with low resolutions. In order to process accurately all the acquired images taken from every robot, image interpolation algorithms could be applied as a preprocessing stage. Consequently, the inherent parallelism and the fundamental features of CA were also used to achieve the desired resolution enhancement. Final results indicate that both the CA based path planner and the image resolution enhancement could be executed concurrently using the resources of each mini robot, confirming their low requirements of computational resources.