Authors:
Janne Haverinen
;
Anssi Kemppainen
;
Janne Kivijakola
and
Juha Röning
Affiliation:
University of Oulu, Finland
Keyword(s):
Multi-robot system, distributed sensing, laser, range sensing.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics
;
Mobile Robots and Autonomous Systems
;
Robotics and Automation
Abstract:
This paper presents a modular multirobot system developed for distributed sensing experiments. The multirobot system is composed of modular small size robots, which have various sensor capabilities including a color stereo camera system and an infrared based sensor for infrastructure independent relative pose estimation of robots. The paper describes the current state of the multirobot system introducing the robots, their sensor capabilites, and some initial experiments conducted with the system. The experiments include a distributed structured light based 3-D scanning experiment involving two robots, and an experiment where a group of robots arrange into a spatial formation and measures distributions of light and magnetic field of an environment. The experiments demonstrate how the proposed multirobot system can be used to extract information from the environment, and how they can cooperatively perform non trivial tasks, like 3-D scanning, which is a difficult task for a single smal
l size robot due to limitations of current sensing technologies. The distributed 3-D scanning method introduced in this paper demonstrates how multirobot system’s inherent properties, i.e. spatial distribution and mobility, can be utilized in a novel way. The experiment demonstrates how distributed measurement devices can be created, in which each robot has an unique role as a part of the device, and in which the mobility of the robots provides flexibility to the structure of the measurement system.
(More)