Swarm Platform Robot (Project Omnibug)

A robot designed for developing and testing swarm intelligence algorithms.

As part of a team of three engineering students completing our capstone project, I helped develop and build three robots with a suite of affordable positioning sensors that could serve as a platform for testing and validating swarm intelligence algorithms. The robots are each equipped with:

• four IR distance sensors around the perimeter
• Two ultrasonic sensors mounted on a servo motor for triangluation and sweeping the area
• an IMU (inertial measurement unit) for tracking acceleration and rotation
• Two motor-driven wheels and two coaster wheels

I was responsible for:

• Designing the IR motherboard and IR daughterboards
• Designing and 3D-printing the IR daughterboard mounts
• Light porting work on the IR sensor drivers to run on our microcontroller
• Re-routing the microcontroller connections to a common bus to support all onboard sensors and motors
• Writing C code for our test-command system
• Designing and 3D-printing the wheels

We built three such robots in total, and each team member got to walk away with a working prototype.