The EvBot II: An Enhanced Evolutionary Robotics Platform Equipped with Integrated Sensing for Control

摘要

The research presented in this thesis describes the design and development of the EvBot II, a small, computationally powerful, and robust evolutionary robotics platform equipped with an acoustic array system. The EvBot II represents the next generation of autonomous robots for distributed robot-colony research, and its design has expanded the sensing capabilities and the overall performance of the EvBot robots by the incorporation of two microcontroller units, shaft encoders and a complete acoustic array system for tracking and navigation purposes. The design, development and test of this new robot is described in detail throughout this thesis, including the design of an USB data acquisition system capable of simultaneously sampling eight audio channels as required for the realization of the added acoustic array system. Experiments designed to evaluate the performance of this new robot and its components are also described in this thesis, as well as experimental results showing that it is a well-suited platform for the study of evolutionary robotics, distributed robot-colonies and sensors technologies.