MILyBots: Design and Development of Swarm-Robots

Abstract

This paper describes the design, development and implementation procedures of a swarm-robotics project (http://mil.ufl.edu/milybots/) at the Machine Intelligence Laboratory (MIL) at the University of Florida. The main objective of this work is to develop a multipurpose and powerful platform for the study and improvement of swarm robotics techniques. The first objective is to produce a set of at least eight small expandable (and easily replicated) robots with on-robot sensory and processing abilities, and with a communication system for off-robot sensors and processing. The second goal is the creation of a cross language platform composed of code written in C, C++ and C#; with a well designed object-oriented platform that closely follows the main paradigms and ideas of objectoriented programming techniques. This paper presents the current state of the ongoing project to create a low-cost, reliable, robust, reusable, movable, size-efficient, power-saving, wireless-capable, and dynamically programmable multi-use research project.