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The WolfBot: Swarm Robotics Platform with Image Processing Applications Jimit Patel Dr. Edgar Lobaton Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering North Carolina State University. What is Swarm Robotics?. Multi-robot system inspired from social insects
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The WolfBot:Swarm Robotics Platform with Image Processing ApplicationsJimit PatelDr. Edgar LobatonDepartment of Electrical and Computer EngineeringNorth Carolina State University
What is Swarm Robotics? • Multi-robot system inspired from social insects • Ability to work co-operatively to achieve a common goal • “Swarm Intelligence”: simple set of rules for individuals, sophisticated collective behavior for the group.
Research in Swarm Robotics • Communications • Control Approach • Mapping and localization • Learning and task allocation • Reconfigurable Robotics • Object transportation and manipulation
Applications • Reconnaissance scenarios such as a natural disaster, search and rescue missions, surveillance, security purposes, mapping unknown terrain or distributed sensing … • Gathering information about environment • Computer Vision
Existing Swarm Robots • Trade-off between cost, size and features • Very few swarm robots have camera • From those which have cameras, ability to take images at good resolution is rare • Those which do take images at good resolution, often lack ability to process images • Finally, those which have ability to process images, aren’t fast enough! (or are very expensive)
The WolfBot • Low Cost • High Performance • Designed for swarm robotics • Ability for on-board image processing • Easily replaceable camera and communication modules • Omnidirectional drive
Processor • Beaglebone- TI AM3359 • ARM Cortex A8, 720 MHz, 256 MB DDR2 RAM • - Ubuntu 12.10 armhf • - OpenCV2.4.2 • C
Sensors Accelerometer, Magnetometer Ambient Light sensors IR Distance Measurement sensors • Camera MS LifeCam HD3000 • Communication IR (Robot-to-Robot) Zigbee Wifi(video stream/ftp)
Sensors • LSM303DLHC 3D Accelerometer and digital compass • Ambient Light Sensors • IR Distance Measurement sensors (~10cm to 100cm) • Microsoft LifeCam HD-3000 • 720p HD, 50 FPS
Communications • Nano wi-fi adaptor used for WLAN. Used for video stream/ftp • IR Transceiver Beacon for short range, line of sight communication (range upto 15 ft) • Zigbee communication for mesh network in the swarm
Battery and Power Management • 7.4V Lithium Ion 5200mAh Battery • Two TPS5420 DC-DC Converters to step down the voltage to 5V and 3.3V
Experimental Results • Currently, the Wolfbot is programmed to receive its co-ordinates from OptiTrack (local positioning system) and move in random directions till it detects an object. • Peak current draw of ~1.5A and upto2.5 hrs of continuous operation (motion, sensing and video stream at 720p resolution)
Edge Detection • Used cvCanny() from OpenCV on 512x512 pixels image • Execution time : 0.05 sec (at 500MHz)* * For comparison, the execution time is 0.34sec for CITRIC platform which used IPP canny edge detection at 520MHz for 512x512 pixel images. Same program on intel core-i5 laptop takes 0.008 sec at 2.6 GHz
Face Detection • Used Haar-Cascades for face detection from OpenCV on 512x512 pixels image
Summary • Introduction of image processing capabilities in swarm robotics research • Low cost design (approx $500) • Facilitates experiments on different research domains in swarm intelligence
References • Haverinen, J., Parpala, M., & Roning, J. (2005). A Miniature Mobile Robot With a Color Stereo Camera System for Swarm Robotics Research. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2005), (April 18-22), 2494–2497. • Rubenstein, M., Ahler, C., & Nagpal, R. (2012). Kilobot: A low cost scalable robot system for collective behaviors. 2012 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 3293–3298. • Zahugi, E. M. H., Shabani, A. M., & Prasad, T. V. (2012). Libot : Design of a Low Cost Mobile Robot for Outdoor Swarm Robotics. IEEE International Conference on Cyber Technology in Automation, Control and Intelligent Systems, (May 27-31), 342–347. • Sibley, G. T., Rahimi, M. H., & Sukhatme, G. S. (2002). Robomote : A Tiny Mobile Robot Platform for Large-scale Ad-hoc Sensor Networks ’. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, (May), 1143–1148. • Mondada, F., Bonani, M., Raemy, X., Pugh, J., Cianci, C., Klaptocz, A., Zufferey, J., et al. (2006). The e-puck , a Robot Designed for Education in Engineering. • Blazovics, L., Varga, C., Csorba, K., Feher, M., Forstner, B., & Charaf, H. (2011). Vision Based Area Discovery with Swarm Robots. 2011 Second Eastern European Regional Conference on the Engineering of Computer Based Systems, 149–150. doi:10.1109/ECBS-EERC.2011.32