HeRo 2.0: A Low-Cost Robot for Swarm Robotics Research

TL;DR

This paper introduces HeRo 2.0, a low-cost, easy-to-assemble swarm robot platform compatible with ROS, designed for research and education, demonstrating effectiveness through experimental validation.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel, open-source, compact robot platform for swarm robotics that is affordable, easy to build, and well-integrated with ROS.

Findings

Effective in swarm robotics experiments

Low-cost and easy to assemble

Suitable for research and education

Abstract

The current state of electronic component miniaturization coupled with the increasing efficiency in hardware and software allow the development of smaller and compact robotic systems. The convenience of using these small, simple, yet capable robots has gathered the research community's attention towards practical applications of swarm robotics. This paper presents the design of a novel platform for swarm robotics applications that is low cost, easy to assemble using off-the-shelf components, and deeply integrated with the most used robotic framework available today: ROS (Robot Operating System). The robotic platform is entirely open, composed of a 3D printed body and open-source software. We describe its architecture, present its main features, and evaluate its functionalities executing experiments using a couple of robots. Results demonstrate that the proposed mobile robot is very effective given its small size and reduced cost, being suitable for swarm robotics research and education.