The Psi Swarm: A Low-Cost Robotics Platform and Its Use in an Education Setting
The paper introduces the Psi Swarm robot, a platform developed to allow both affordable research in swarm robotics and versatility for teaching programming and robotics concepts. Motivated by the goals of reducing cost and construction complexity of exist
- PDF / 2,019,828 Bytes
- 7 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 79 Downloads / 158 Views
Abstract. The paper introduces the Psi Swarm robot, a platform developed to allow both affordable research in swarm robotics and versatility for teaching programming and robotics concepts. Motivated by the goals of reducing cost and construction complexity of existing swarm platforms, we have developed a trackable, sensor-rich and expandable platform which needs only a computer with internet browser to program. This paper outlines the design of the platform and the development of a tablet-computer based programming environment for the robot, intended to teach primary school aged children programming concepts. Keywords: Swarm robotics · Educational robotics · Teaching · Android
1
Introduction
Simple robotic platforms are ideal tools for teaching a wide range of science and engineering disciplines, encompassing electronics, embedded programming, control theory, signal processing and energy management. When the scope of the individual robot is expanded to allow communication and interaction with other similar robots, their potential value as a tool for research expands to allow investigation of swarm intelligence: the study of complex swarm behaviours and emergent behaviours. The motivation for this research was to create a new platform to replace a similar robot previously developed by the authors (the Pi Swarm robot [2]) with the goal of reducing cost, improving functionality and specifically enhancing its strengths as a versatile robot for use in a classroom environment. It was desired to have a robotic platform flexible enough to allow the tuition of core robotic disciplines to a wide range of age groups, whilst being scalable enough to permit large swarm research to also take place. Such platforms often come at a cost which is prohibitive to education and research, both in pure monetary terms, and also in the context of the time needed to learn how to use and program a system, and regarding general maintenance such as recharging and repairing.
c Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 L. Alboul et al. (Eds.): TAROS 2016, LNAI 9716, pp. 158–164, 2016. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-40379-3 16
The Psi Swarm: A Low-Cost Robotics Platform 8 Side-mounted Infrared Proximity Sensors MBED Socket Bluetooth Module
5 Base-mounted Infrared Sensors
159
8 Edge-mounted Dual colour LEDs Tilt-Compensated Compass Module Piezo Sounder Base Colour Sensor
Geared Motors Optical Encoders 14500 Li-Po Battery Robot ID Switch Recharging Contacts 16x2 Character Display
5-Way Cursor Switch
Power Switch
Fig. 1. Photo of the main Psi Swarm PCB with additional modules
2
Hardware Design
The Psi Swarm robot is based around a dual-layer 108 mm diameter PCB, shown annotated in Fig. 1. A pair of 40-pin sockets allow for a MBED LPC1768 rapid prototyping board to be attached, which functions as the main controller for the robot. The MBED is a small module based around an ARM Cortex-M3 microcontroller. One of the core features of the MBED board is it is designed for use with a special set of online compiler tools, which allow for the d
Data Loading...
