Spider-Bots: A Low Cost Cooperative Robotics Platform

Multi-robot teams with many members can be very demanding in terms of both monetary and spatial resources, major limitations in both laboratory and classroom settings.A reduction in both the size and cost of robots that remain capable of testing a myriad of algorithms allows for much more research and education in the field of swarm robotics.The developed platform seeks to achieve all of these goals with centimeterscale mobile robots that can interact with their environment and communicate wirelessly, along with easy to use software libraries.It was validated by testing its ability to execute and record data from two separate algorithms: Set-point navigation and object manipulation.