Swarm robot project

This is my 4th year electrical engineering design project. It consists of 6 (5 in this video) low-cost robots working together to find a particular location on the ground.

Both hardware and software were designed and built by us. The design centers around a PIC24F micro-controller powered by a single cell 450mAh lithium polymer battery. The robot drives using two small pager motors soldered onto 14ga copper wire that act as legs. The motors are controlled by a dual H bridge controller, getting direction signals from the PIC, and a PWM signal to control speed.

Communication between robots is performed by multiplexing a serial output with a 38kHz carrier, and driving four IR LEDs (one on each side). Receiving is handled using a 38kHz receiver that will strip out the carrier and return the serial stream. All communications run through a software 8 bit CRC to ensure validity.

Collision detection works using a pair of piezo-electric elements clamped and filtered to reduce their output voltage and sensitivity, feeding external interrupts. A third post and loop type sensor hangs below to detect the location object on the field.

Robots will wander randomly until one finds the object. When it does, it will stop and transmit a gather command to other robots. The other robots will try to gather to within the proximity of the first robot.

There is a laptop and IR transceiver in the back which is simply used to issue basic commands like "Reset" and "Go". It does not interfere in any other way.

Green or no LED indicates the robot is reset, waiting for a "go" command. Red and Blue indicate that the robot has collided and changed direction. Orange indicates that the robot understands someone has found the object. Purple/white indicates the robot has found the robot that found the object, Red/Green/Blue indicates the robot found an object.

The robots have varying transmission ranges. Some are a few inches, several are a few feet, which makes demonstrating on this 3x3 arena difficult.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• PIC24F
• PIC
• Swarm
• Robot
• Engineering
• Project
• lipo
• IR

[Annoyingrob]

It's a pic 24f microcontroller, can't remember the actual part number off the top of my head. We modulated the uart with a 38khz carrier, and transmit it with ir leds. The receivers are srandard 38khz ir receivers. At full power the range is about 30ft. We implemented a pure aloha transmission scheme, and crc error checking for collision detection and avoidance.

[sopsychedtobehere]

What controller are you using and how are they transmitting to each other?