UB Robot Swarm - Design, Implementation, and Power Management

Abstract

In this paper we describe the hardware architecture of an inexpensive, heterogeneous robot swarm, designed and developed at the RISC lab, University of Bridgeport. Each swarm robot is equipped with sensors, actuators, control and communication units, power supply, and interconnection mechanism. This article also describes the essential features and design of a power distribution and management system for a dynamically reconfigurable system. It further presents the empirical results of the proposed power management system collected with the real robotic applications.