HeRoSwarm: Fully-Capable Miniature Swarm Robot Hardware Design With Open-Source ROS Support

TL;DR

HeRoSwarm is an open-source, fully-capable miniature swarm robot platform integrating sensing, communication, computing, and power modules, supporting ROS, designed for research and educational purposes.

Contribution

It introduces a low-cost, modular, and fully-capable swarm robot hardware with open-source support, filling gaps in existing platforms by combining multiple functionalities in a tiny form factor.

Findings

Successfully demonstrated multi-robot experiments with HeRoSwarm

Verified the robot's sensing, communication, and computing capabilities

Showcased extensibility through various prototypes

Abstract

Experiments using large numbers of miniature swarm robots are desirable to teach, study, and test multi-robot and swarm intelligence algorithms and their applications. To realize the full potential of a swarm robot, it should be capable of not only motion but also sensing, computing, communication, and power management modules with multiple options. Current swarm robot platforms developed for commercial and academic research purposes lack several of these critical attributes by focusing only on a few of these aspects. Therefore, in this paper, we propose the HeRoSwarm, a fully-capable swarm robot platform with open-source hardware and software support. The proposed robot hardware is a low-cost design with commercial off-the-shelf components that uniquely integrates multiple sensing, communication, and computing modalities with various power management capabilities into a tiny footprint. Moreover, our swarm robot with odometry capability with Robot Operating Systems (ROS) support is unique in its kind. This simple yet powerful swarm robot design has been extensively verified with different prototyping variants and multi-robot experimental demonstrations.