Proteus-I: A Flexible and Adaptable Low-Cost General-Purpose Micro-Robot Prototype for Swarm Robotics

Abstract

Swarm intelligence is a subfield of artificial intelligence based on the collective behavior of decentralized, self-organized systems comprised of very simple individual interacting locally with one another and with their environment. Such interactions lead to the emergence of intelligent behavior, unknown to the individual agents. One of the most remarkable applications of swarm intelligence is swarm robotics, Swarm robotics is one of the most exciting developments in artificial intelligence during the last few years is swarm robotics, where expensive and sophisticated robots can be replaced by a swarm of simple inexpensive micro-robots. In this context, this paper introduces Proteus-I, a flexible and adaptable low-cost general-purpose micro-robot prototype especially designed for swarm robotics. The robot has been designed to support the most popular swarm intelligence algorithms by either hardware or software. The paper describes the main components of the micro-robot along with some of the most important features to support swarm intelligence algorithms for swarm robotics.