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Electrical and Information Engineering

Faculty of Technology > Electrical and Information Engineering > Computer Engineering Laboratory


ROBOTICS

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[http://www.ee.oulu.fi/research/robotics/minirobot/]

THE MINIROBOT - A miniature mobile robot for multi robot research

$RCSfile: index.html,v $ $Revision: 1.6 $ $Date: 2006/06/01 12:22:46 $

ABSTRACT

When a swarm robotics research project, involving a physical multi-agent system, is initiated, one problem is to have a mobile robot platform that has the required capabilities like the right sensor set, a flexible power system, a communication link, and enough computing power, for example. It is often also desirable to implement the multi-agent system by using physically small robots, which permit meaningful research to be done in a limited work space. Today, majority of the commercially available mobile robots are physically large and expensive, which makes them unsuitable for many swarm robotics projects. On the other hand, there is hardly any small size robots available, that have the capabilities required in a state-of-art swarm robotics research. A key feature that has been missing from many miniature robots is a color stereo camera system, enabling on-board image processing and analysis, and permitting various surveillance applications. In this project, a novel miniature mobile robot has been developed. The robot consists of independent sensor and actuator modules, which reduces the computation load of the main processor unit. The modular architecture also makes the system extendible. Furthermore, the stereo color camera system permits onboard image processing and image analysis, which is an unmatched feature in various multi-agent applications.

PUBLICATIONS

Haverinen J, Parpala M & Röning J (2005), A Miniature Mobile Robot With a Color Stereo Camera System for Swarm Robotics Research, Proc. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA2005), Apr 18-22, Barcelona, Spain, p. 2494-2497. [pdf]
Kemppainen A, Haverinen J & Röning J (2006) An Infrared Location System for Relative Pose Estimation of Robots, Proc. 16-th CISM-IFToMM Syposium of Robot Design, Dynamics, and Control (ROMANSY 2006), Jun 20 - 24, Warsaw, Poland (submitted). [pdf]

video  : Minirobot is "playing" with Aibo [4.1MB].
video  : Relative pose estimation by using the IR-location system [2.0MB].
picture: four Minirobots in a hallway.

Contact information

janne . haverinen (at) ee . oulu . fi

[http://www.ee.oulu.fi/research/robotics/minirobot/]

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