SIN: A Programmable Platform for Swarm Robotics

Swarm robotics is an inspiration from nature and incorporates swarm intelligence to help collective robotics. This recent technology is usually characterized by a swarm of simple, low-cost, and small robots instead of a complicated and expensive robot. Designing optimal and reliable swarm intelligence algorithms require real-world test environments. As a practical solution, physical platforms can efficiently address this issue. In this paper, a programmable physical platform, called SIN, is introduced for swarm robotics. Different design parameters such as communication range, signaling pattern, types of sensors and actuators, cooperation rules, and degree of uncertainty and noise can be simply adjusted by user. The building blocks of each agent has been developed in a modular form to improve the hardware flexibility. To illustrate the efficiency of the proposed platform, a cooperative multi-robot target tracking problem is implemented on this platform as a case study, where the robots interact by artificial attraction-repulsion forces based on short-range and noisy optical communication. The results demonstrate how the details of swarm behaviors such as decentralized aggregation and collective target tracking can be successfully implemented on the proposed platform.