2.4 A Distributed Autonomous and Collaborative Multi-Robot System Featuring a Low-Power Robot SoC in 22nm CMOS for Integrated Battery-Powered Minibots

Multi-robot systems, working collectively to accomplish complex missions beyond the capability of a single robot, are required for a wide range of applications such as search-and-rescue, precision agriculture and industrial automation. The collective behavior of a multi-robot system is governed by its continuous interactions with the physical environment, inter-robot information exchange, and intelligent decision making. Energy-efficient performance, size, weight and scalability of the key sensor, compute, communication, control and actuator components [1–3] of the individual robot platform are critical for realizing efficient advanced systems. In this paper, we demonstrate a distributed, autonomous and collaborative multi-robot system featuring integrated, battery-powered, crawling and jumping minibots for an example search-and-rescue application. We present a 16 mm2 low-power Robot SoC in 22 nm CMOS that is integrated in the cm-scale minibot platform along with audiovisual and motion sensors, battery, low-power wireless communication and motion actuator components (Fig. 2.4.7).