Small robot agents with on-board vision and local intelligence

Abstract

We designed a family of completely autonomous mobile robots with local intelligence. We developed a controller with a variety of digital and analog I/O facilities and the operating system RoBIOS, which allows maximum flexibility. The robots have a number of on-board sensors, including vision, and do not rely on global sensor systems. The on-board computing power is sufficient to analyze several color images per second. This enables the robots to perform several different task such as navigation, map generation or intelligent group behavior and does not limit them to the game of robot soccer.