Before diving into the nitty-gritty of the robot design I wanted to take a moment and lay out a brief description of the network and base robot architecture. Below is a block diagram and description of both the network topology and the configuration of the robots.

Network Topology

The pure swarm approach for a fully modular network would involve a mesh network with with no centralized control source. Instead of doing this I'm opting for a robot swarm with central control node, much like how a bee hive has a queen. And, since robot dancing has not reached bee levels of communication, I'm going to leverage existing technology and use WiFi. This will make it easier to use existing single board computers (e.g. the Raspberry Pi) for robot control instead of making a homebrew control board. Having all of the robots on a single WiFi network will also make it easy to remote login to the individual robots for telepresence control.

I also plan on having a single, central node to handle the complex control and collate all of the data provided by the individual swarm robots. This central point will also have the WiFi access point. Having a single master may seem counter-intuitive for a robot swarm but it will make development and control much easier. A powerful central computer can do complicated operations such as image processing and parsing the most efficient paths for each robot to take. The central node can also handle delegation by directing each robot to assume a role in heterogeneous swarms when different tasks need to be handled by the robots. Another benefit of making a single master node is debugging. Having the central node keep track of all of the data will make it easier to access the swarm's status and provide a clear picture of how the system is operating.

Base Robot Configuration

I've tried my best to limit the robot's base design (i.e., the components that will be common between all robots no matter their role or attached modules) to the very minimum. The block diagram above is what I came up with.

Each robot will have three core modules built in to the base design: one for power control and distribution, one for motor control, and one for localization. The only exception will be the central node which won't have the motor control module. The modules will all report to a central CPU. Each of these modules will be intelligent with its own microcontroller for real time control and calculations. Having a microcontroller for each module abstracts away the processing required for each module and lets the CPU retrieve processed data and send commands without having to manage every single component.

I decided on using a full SoC rather than just a microcontroller to help speed up development and to potentially allow for some image processing and other calculations to be done locally. The Pi Zero W seems like the best bet for this at the moment due to its native camera support and on-board WiFi (and the large support community is a huge plus!). Using a full Linux system will also make software design easier without requiring constant retrieval and firmware flashing every time the software changes. It will be simple enough to remote in to each robot for control and status update over SSH.

I plan on defining the interface and functionality of each module in the next few posts. I also want to outline and explain my method for robot localization in detail. That will be my next post.