The Design of a Pair of Identical Mobile Robots to Investigate Cooperative Behaviours

mechanical size and weight of devices being built, with a proportional increase in expense. An alternative to this conventional trend is the use of cooperative behaviour. Humans are limited by their physical size and strength – and yet are capable of moving heavy furniture and other large items outside their individual strength ability. This is accomplished with the help of another person to share the load, or a large number of people for a substantial object. Requirements of coordination, communication and precision control have restricted this approach being considered for mobile robots in the past. However, more powerful processors and software are removing these barriers, permitting cooperative robots to be seriously considered for a number of applications. By working in parallel, cooperative behaviour can increase efficiency and reduce the time required to complete a task. Reliability is increased by introducing redundancy when using a team of robots, while cost is reduced due to the use of smaller simplistic machine designs. Application specific design and manufacturing costs can be removed by fabricating the robots semi-generically. Reduced weight means less preparation and upkeep of the working environment, and new complex tasks can be introduced which are too difficult for a single entity to achieve. We demonstrate a methodology for the construction of a low-cost, versatile, highly manoeuvrable and computationally powerful robot capable of autonomous operation. We demonstrate that these robots can be fabric ated at a small fraction of the price of equivalent commercial systems. As our interest is in the development of cooperative robotic behaviour, the software control system, machine interface and an introduction to cooperative robotic systems are also discussed.