Hardware for Hands-Free Operation of the Robots

The Swarm infrastructure components, provide the physical resources the robots need to keep themselves running. These include chargers, navigational beacons, and semi automated test stand. The charging stations are the most important of these components, as they allow the robots to autonomously recharge their batteries.

The long range navigation beacons are designed to help guide the robots to their chargers from anywhere in their workspace. In practice, we have found that it is easier to provide a multi-hop communications route, and hence navigational path, to the chargers using the robot’s local communications system. This eliminates the need to set up any additional hardware. The SwarmBot’s bump skirts provide the robust low-level obstacle avoidance needed to allow both the navigation and docking behaviors to run successfully.

The SwarmBot’s power management circuitry has four modes of operation: ON, Standby, Off, nab Battery disconnect. The standby mode allows the user to power-on the robots remotely from a “gateway robot”, once ON, the robot can be remotely powered down via the same interface. This ability supports the sporadic nature of software development; the robots remain on during periods of active progress, but can be easily powered down to conserve batteries when a difficult bug slows the pace. This reduces wear on the batteries, and allows the user to maintain a particular physical arrangement of robots for testing far longer than if the robots was left on continuously.