Cooperative Explorations with Wirelessly Controlled Robots
Robots have gained an ever increasing role in the lives of humans by allowing more efficient completion of tasks, ranging from healthcare to manufacturing. One area that robots have not been fully utilized in is multi robots with autonomous exploration. In this research, we investigate how to use multiple robots collaboratively to explore and search the target more efficiently than a single robot is capable of. Given the task of finding a specific object from different areas, one robot will scout an area while the other robot will also scout a different area and pick up an object if it locates one. If the scout robot locates the object, then the scout will report the room that the object is located in by sending the room number between the robots. To achieve the tasks described above, robots should be at least able to communicate with each other, navigate different areas, detect objects, and grab the target. In this project, we have developed a communication method between robots, two navigation algorithms for two robots to avoid obstacles and navigate areas, object detection, and voice control. In addition, we developed some wireless phone control functions to provide the flexibility and convenience for users. Our experiments have demonstrated that above algorithms and methods can successfully make multi robots work cooperatively to explore different areas and find the target. Index Terms EZ Robots, Autonomous, Exploration, Object Detection and Avoidance, Voice Control