Simulation and design of a glider swarm robotics platform

The main purpose of my thesis is to develop a Swarm Robotics Platform which will
use Cellular Automata Glider model and generate itself with “Game of Life” rules.
The method was experimentally tested with autonomous mobile robots and real-time
PC based simulation software, in all cases very good paths were obtained with
negligible processing effort, and low cost production. Presented results indicate that
the Cellular Automata approach is a very promising method for real time path planning
and Glider like robotic swarms can be used for self-replicating and moving swarm
robots.
We designed five identical mobile robots that interact with each other and the
simulation software at PC through RF connection. PC runs a Glider simulation
simultaneously while robots play “Game of Life” on the grid. Presented model is a
self-organized and a self-driven mechanism.
The base platform used is a lattice of squared cells, but the shape of cells can be
hexagonal and other shapes as well. Each cell can exist in 2 or more different states
(not simultaneoulsy). Most basically ON/OFF states of bright LEDs at the top of each
robot is controlled as an indicator to show dead/alive modes of the robots. We expect
our robots to move on the lattice base as in Glider form and keep their formation
patterns after each step.
Mobile robots are based on Arduino Nano boards. NRF24L01 RF modules used for
communication. ULN2803 IC is used to drive two stepper motors (28BJY-48). Each
robot is powered with a pack of 4 AA batteries.
Each member robot will keep its track and location information and inform the main
PC simulation software. After each robot completes its action, the simulation software
moves to the next pattern of Glider and the LEDs of robots will be turned ON (Live
Mode).
Atmel328P based board with a NRF24L01 RF module establishes the real time
communication between Glider robots and the PC. Main module transfers required
pattern data to each individual Glider robot and receives a confirmation of correct data
transmission from each robot. After each robot gets its required data, then the main
module updates the information of simulation software that runs on the PC. It is
possible to observe the pattern evolution of Glider robots on the simulation software.
Processing programming language is used to create the simulation software.
xvi
With all these simple and commonly found parts, each robot was produced with quite
a cheap and simple way. Thus, the total number of robots can be increased to more
than 5 and different CA models can be realized with this platform.
Some improvements should be done on our system such as including another
NRF24L01 module for each 6 mobile robots due to available channel number
restriction of RF module used. Atmel2560 based board can provide much more
communication capability for crowder Swarms with additional RF modules.
Another future development of the system should be to include a path finding
algorithm into simulation and create “maze solving” or “target searching” Swarm
group with much better performance. This method will allow to conclude results in
much shorter times and with much less effort.