Abstract—Biological swarm is a fascinating behavior of nature that has been successfully applied to solve human problem especially for robotics application. The high economical cost and large area required to execute swarm robotics scenarios does not permit experimentation with real robot. Model and simulation of the mass number of these robots are extremely complex and often inaccurate. This paper describes the design decision and presents the development of an autonomous miniature mobile-robot (AMiR) for swarm robotics research and education. The large number of robot in these systems allows designing an individual AMiR unit with simple perception and mobile abilities. Hence a large number of robots can be easily and economically feasible to be replicated. AMiR has been designed as a complete platform with supporting software development tools for robotics education and researches in the Department of Computer and Communication Systems Engineering, UPM. The experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of using this robot to implement swarm robotic applications.

Index Terms—Autonomous, AMiR, Swarm intelligent, Low-cost, Platform, Education.

Farshad Arvin and Khairulmizam Samsudin are with the Computer Systems Research Group, Department of Computer and Communication Systems Engineering, University of Putra Malaysia, UPM 43400, Serdang, Selangor, Malaysi
Abdul Rahman Ramli is with the Intelligent System and Robotic Lab, University of Putra Malaysia, UPM 43400, Serdang, Selangor, Malaysia

Cite: Farshad Arvin, Khairulmizam Samsudin and Abdul Rahman Ramli, "Development of a Miniature Robot for Swarm Robotic Application," International Journal of Computer and Electrical Engineering vol. 1, no. 4, pp. 436-442, 2009.