Platform for biomimetic swarms

Abstract

In the past decade, a large number of robots were designed to mimic mobility behavior of organisms in nature. The biologically inspired robots improve the mobility of traditional robotic vehicles and make them robust for different terrains unlike the traditional robots. Navigation in most of the biomimetic robots developed so far are either controlled by dedicated pattern generator modules within robotic structure or by loading the control patterns generated in a computer onto the robots. These biomimetic robots are not fully autonomous in their abilities to navigate in the area of interest. We propose to build a biomimetic snake like robotic module from a set of independent robotic modules. These modules are autonomous and can function as swarm of robots or can link together to form a biomimetic snake like unit using their intelligence. Such a behaviour can be utilized in search and rescue operations, accessing hazardous or inaccessible terrains, monitoring pipelines etc. In this paper we evaluate the hardware requirements for building such a biomimetic robot and also illustrate the research platform which we have developed based on the assessment. This platform has enough computational and peripheral capabilities to provide autonomous behavior to the robot and also to support the swarm and biomimetic behaviour. This low cost prototype is modular and hence enable the user to make modifications to the structure to suit a specific application.