Mona: an Affordable Mobile Robot for Swarm Robotic Applications

Abstract

Mobile robots are playing a significant role in multi and swarm robotic research studies. The high cost of commercial mobile robots is a significant challenge that limits the number of swarm based research studies that implement real robotic platforms. On the other hand, the observed results from simulated robots using simulation software are not representative of results that would be obtained using real robots. There are therefore considerable benefits in the development of an affordable open-source and flexible platform that allows students and researchers to implement experiments using real robot systems. Mona is an open-source and open-hardware mobile robot that has been developed at the University of Manchester for this purpose. Mona provides a robotic solution that can be programmed and operated using a user-friendly interface, Arduino, with relative ease. The low cost of the platform means that it is feasible for a large number of these robots to be used in swarm robotic scenarios.