Swarm Control

*** DEVELOPER VERSION - Please use with caution ***

If you are looking for the Robosapien app go to https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.wowwee.roboremote

Introduction

In our attempt to control a swarm of robots we came up with a first draft of an app which will let you connect to a wide range of different robots, including but not limited to toy robots, cleaning robots, flying robots and our self developed arduino robot aka "Dotty". The app allows remote control of the different robots and provides the user with their sensor information. In a later stage the app will make use of the available sensors of each individual robot and control the robots either individually or as a swarm, depending on the task.

The swarm behaviours available in the app will cover subjects like playing (eg. play tag, hide and seek, etc), moving (eg. marching, following, dancing etc), chatting (eg. count each other) and charting (eg. searching, rescuing, guarding etc).

Robots

Available Robots are the IRobot Roomba, Lego Mindstorms NXT, Meccano Spykee, Wowwee RoboScooper, Parrot AR Drone and AR Drone 2.0, Brookstone AC13 Rover and Rover 2.0, I-Spy Tank, Replicator and our home-made robot Dotty.

The robots can be controlled remotely by means of arrow buttons, the smartphone's built-in accelerometer and the newly added joystick. Where available, autonomous functions and individual features can be executed for each robot.
Next to the remote control, the sensor data of the robots can be displayed on the smartphone. These sensors are individual for each robot and range from basic sensors like Light and Battery to Audio and Video Streams.

For a more detailed description of each robot as well as support or information about setup and prerequisites please refer to the blog posts and forum on our website http://www.dobots.nl.

Swarm Actions

As a first step towards swarm behaviour and to be a simple showcase we chose to implement dancing for the robots. The available robots can be grouped and a dance can be created out of simple moves such as Forward / Backward / Left / Right, etc. Once a dance is started, the robots will execute each move until the dance is over.

Outlook

The app is still under heavy development and although a lot of our current stock of robots were added already there is lots of interesting stuff to come

- More Robots! A swarm can never be too big! There is still the Surveyor, the SpyGear Trakr, the Finch and the Terrain Twister. But we are always looking for more, so if you know of any other robots with sensor which could be added to our collection let us know!
- We just started to tickle the iceberg of swarm control behaviours and our next ventures will be in the field of Multi Robot SLAM
- Interface robots with home automation systems, thus enabling them to interact with their surroundings and/or benefiting from sensors in their environment.
- And not forgetting, the robots want to be hooked up to the Internet and the cloud

If you are interested you should definitely check back on our website http://www.dobots.nl where we will keep track of the development. But also the app is completely open source; you can find the code at https://github.com/eggerdo/swarm-control. Feel free to contribute and add your own robots to the list or let us know which ones you want to see added!