GENGRID: A Generalised Reconfigurable Distributed Experimental Enviromental Grid For Swarm Robotics
We present GenGrid, a comprehensive open-source distributed platform for swarm robotics experiments, which can accommodate different types of swarm robotics platforms such as Kilobot, Colias and similar robotic platforms. It acts as a tool for sensory feedback, messaging, macro-level data collection and interaction. It enables researchers to have programmable control over the experimental setup and its parameters. GenGrid is a modular grid of attachable computing nodes that provide for agent to grid-node and grid-node to grid-node bidirectional communication. This study describes the hardware and software architecture of the GenGrid system and some case studies accompanied by its distribution as a new open-hardware tool for the multi-robot research, swarm robotics and human-robot interaction community. We demonstrate the capabilities of the GenGrid using a 25-module 375mm X 375mm GenGrid, two robots, and the following case studies: obstacle avoidance, path following based on multiple gradients, pheromone-based foraging, collective transport, and shepherding.
