Swarm Robots Pheromone Idea
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Pheromone Idea
To better imitate the real world swarm behavior, one really common way of communication between insects is pheromone. We could achieve the similar effect by the following measure:
- Each robot is equipped with light sensor at bottom, and LED light on top.
- A big screen is used as the "World".
- A birds view camera is setup to capture the light from each LED on top of the robot.
- When a robot wants to leave pheromone signals, LED is lit up, camera picks it up and process it through computer and start to show different colours on the screen (and spread and fade away) as pheromone.
- When a robot travels to a zone where pheromone (different colour on screen) exists, it gets pick up by the light sensor at bottom.
This provides a easy way to communicate to each individual robot, (e.g. re-program each individual robot all at the same time wirelessly through flash the data through the screen to the light sensor.)
How to start
- create rules and actions for the world
- first build a simple IR beacon and one robot to figure out the transmission protocol we want to use -- Edward would like to take up the protocol design.
- build more robots and beacons for different tasks
- make the swarm interacting
- create a web interface with a webcam to control the robots via internet
