Compass and odometry based navigation of a mobile robot swarm equipped by bluetooth communication

Abstract

This study is dealing with how we built up a new chain (line) of communication with the help of some simple “Dual NXT” robots at the Kecskemét College faculty of GAMF at the Department of Information Technology. The first part of this article describes how the communication takes place between members of the robot swarm during the movement and how robots - organized in swarm - can be used in the search simulation. In the second part we present that the odometry method, which we used for the robot movement control, caused too many imprecision because we used magnetic compass sensors for controlling of robots. This simulation can serve as a starting point of a new practical application, where for example the robots do not look for and collect food in a simulated area, but look for mobile phones in a cells divided area and transport text files between two phones via bluetooth.