- Plan:
The initial plan for our group was to build a 3-robot swarm mechanism, in which robots distributed separately would clump together, one by one. In the mechanism, numbered and labelled robots would be distributed so that they have uneven distances from each other. Then, the software would look for the two robots that are closest to each other, and make one of them (the one with the lower order number) go towards the next one, and then both of them would proceed to the one that’s the farthest.
2. Materials
Microbit x 3
Robotbit set x 4 (optional)
HD 920c Logitech camera
Mac mini
Aruco markers
3. Production
We started with setting up the aruco repository on our computers. I set up a separate forked repo for that, and gave instructions so that the entire group has access to the code. At first, our concerns were mostly mechanical – we didn’t know how the robot would figure out its rotation angle, and how we would send the data to the swarm.
We figured that we have to use one microbit as an antenna, in order to then send data to the other robots.
We successfully figured out how to send serial data to the antenna. However, we ran into issues when trying to send them forward to the other microbits. We still did not quite end up understanding how to make the robots move in a specific direction and to give them specific angles of rotation. This could be the next step of the lab.
4. Code: