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

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.

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

“…A recent swarm robot design with a similar name HeRo2.0 [23], has ROS compatibility and wheel encoders. While it has an array of proximity sensors, the robot is equipped with an ESP12 as the sole control unit to handle the motor control and network communication for the robot with the ROS middleware at a server.…”