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Fri, 06 Oct 2006
some progress with "swarm mode" ...
Here's a demonstration from a first attempt at implementing new commands to support swarm operation, as described a few days ago. It seems that this will be an effective approach, and in general, the communication channels are staying clear so that there isn't much confusion, even when we ask a given robot to send images.
The only real problem we've encountered so far is with the command acknowledgment strings from a bunch of robots flooding the incoming data buffer of a robot that has been busy doing other things, and therefore causing the robot to miss a command from the host. In the worst case, the solution is to send commands individually to each robot instead of relying on the "broadcast mode" (FF addressing) to reach all robots.
Here's a 2.3Mb Quicktime clip of 4 SRV-1's operating in close proximity in "wander mode". The robots here don't have any goal except to stay within a defined area and avoid running into obstacles or each other. The robots are controlled by a single base station on a common radio channel using new "swarm mode" commands defined in the SRV-1 communication protocol update. You can click on the image below to launch a viewer ...
The next step may be to do the IR beacon experiment that was proposed earlier, but a more exciting extension would be the addition of object tracking ... so stay tuned for more news.
If anyone with multiple SRV-1's wants to experiment with this, let us know via email at support@surveyor.com.
Posted Fri, 06 Oct 2006 15:39 | HTML Link | see additional stories ...