The autonomous micro robot "Alice": a platform for scientific and commercial applications

Over the last years various mobile micro robots have been developed at different labs for research issues. Most of them have remarkable features but are handmade prototypes not suitable for large-scale production. This paper presents a micro robot design where major efforts have been undertaken in order to reduce costs and facilitate serial production, while improving the performances of the robot. The newly designed robot consists of only three major parts, the flexible print with the electronics and the two motors directly mounted on it, the plastic frame on which the print is attached by four screws and the battery. Thanks to its very low costs, the micro robot is of high interest for multiple robot applications, for investigation of collective behavior and for the toy market. Our robot Alice with a size about 2/spl times/2/spl times/2 cm, has a ultra low power consumption allowing autonomy up to 10 hours, and has a modular concept for programming and hardware extension. This makes it very useful for research and future developments. We extended the robot's abilities with 4 distance sensors, an infrared communication module and a radio communication module. By only modifying the software, many additional functions are available. Some of them are presented such as obstacle avoidance, wall following, remote inspection and guidance, communication between robots and multi-robot exploration.