Before doing the circuit design and PCB layout I wanted to briefly outline the architecture of the core robot modules and the communication between them. The core modules are the ones that will be present on every robot in the swarm and provides the critical functionality that's required for the robot to operate. To make programming easier and reduce load on the main processor I've decided that each module will have a processor that will intelligently communicate with the main board and abstract away as many unnecessary details as possible.

Main Processor

The main board will be a single board computer that will do all of the "thinking" for the whole robot. It will handle communication to the swarm master and pass information between each of the modules within a robot. Due to the large community and low cost I've decided to use the Pi Zero W as the main processor. I'll be using the GPIO header as the main connector and each module will be connected together through this common header. Each of the submodules will be I2C slaves and will be directed by the Raspberry Pi on the I2C bus. The Pi Zero W also has the benefit of built-in WiFi which further reduces the cost and complexity of the robot.

Power Module

The power module will be fairly dumb with it's only task being to supply power to the whole module stack. For the first iteration I only plan on measuring battery voltage/percentage via the onboard processor but I may expand these capabilities in the future to include things like power usage, current, battery health, etc.

Motor Controller

The motor controller board will be responsible for the actual movement of the robot. My initial design will have the ability to control two motors as well as encoders to close the loop and verify that the robot has moved where expected. As I mentioned in my previous post, encoders are subject to drift so these encoders will verify that the robot movement is in the right ball park and will only be used for a single move. This means that the encoder position will be reset after each move is completed.

I plan on having this module be intelligent enough to handle all coordinated motion without intervention from the main processor board. The Raspberry Pi should be able to send the board an XY position, say "Go here," and have the motor board handle the rest. It will also be able to query this submodule for certain status such as current position, status of the move, etc.

Localization

Due to the relative complexity of the localization algorithm, as outlined in my previous post, the localization board will be the most complicated. It required IR LEDs for transmitting the sync signal, IR receivers for receiving another robot's sync signal, and ultrasonic transducers for sending and receiving localization pings.

This submodule won't be as independent as the motor controller board due to the inter-robot communication requirements of the localization algorithm, but the interface should be simple. The board will only take one command, to send out a ping, so it knows to trigger the sync signal and localization signal on the IR LED and ultrasonic transmitter. Otherwise the board will constantly wait to receive an IR sync signal and will calculate distance from the transmitting robot based on how long it is until the localization signal arrives. The main processor board will then be able to query the localization board for the distance to the transmitting robot.

With the basics of the submodules laid out the next step is designing the circuits and PCBs!