WeeMiK: A low-cost omnidirectional swarm platform for outreach, research and education

We present our recent work on the electrical and hardware design of the multi-robot mobile platform WeeMiK. The goal of this project was to develop a low-cost and robust but extensible platform for research and educational purpose especially in swarm robotics. WeeMiK structure enables large-scale innovative, new curriculum, multi-agent research and mobile robot outreach to artificial intelligent students. We introduce WeeMiK platform, which offers a balance between capabilities, accessibility, cost and an open-design with open source programing SDK. All of electrical structure include sensors, motor drive, wireless communication system and device communication manager (DCM), are designed based on a 8-Bit AVR micro-controller that runs under Real-Time Operating System (freeRTOS) with tasks scheduling. With a range of different sensors like inertia navigation system (INS), IR ring for both transceiver data besides proximity, wireless communication and omnidirectional locomotion system, not only WeeMiK can interact with environment in multiple ways, but it also able to communicate with the other WeeMiKs and or PC, therefore it can be used in various swarm robotic scenarios. We demonstrate the usability of our concept by quantifying the obstacle avoidance task and also briefly describe the software design based on Arduino and freeRTOS framework for educational usage.