Open Design for ~$800 Swarm Robots

An anonymous reader writes "There are lots of multi-robot designs out there. Most are either research platforms well over $2K (often $10K or more), or are hobbyist bots under $400 with tiny brains and few sensors. But George Mason University's new FlockBots wiki is interesting. They're trying to pack as much functionality as possible into a roughly $800, 7" mobile swarmbot, and publish the design and software as a free and open spec. So far their design includes a wireless 200MHz Gumstix Linux computer, a camera, range and bump sensors, wheel encoders, a can gripper, and lots more. It's a great-looking design and I think the cost could drop to $500 with vendors doing consolidation."

Re:Interesting equipment choice

[belphegore]

I think they haven't yet got a Robostix [gumstix.org], which we designed to be a replacement for the Brainstem at a much lower price, with a better feature set, and better gumstix integration. Still not much there on the software side for Robostix, but all your normal AVR tools should work great, and control of the robostix from userspace on the gumstix is just around the corner.

Re:Interesting equipment choice

[awkScooby]

My Robostix was ordered last week, and should arrive next week. We'll be evaluating it to see how good a fit it is for the FlockBots, and how much effort there will be in switching to it (soldering ~40 pins per board adds up).

If nothing else, I look forward to a microcontroller that can keep up with the quadrature wheel encoders. Having to use polling on the Brainstem was less than ideal -- we had to slow the bots down a whole lot.

Another approach...

[Jesrad]

I can think of another sort [wikipedia.org] of open source robots that cost well under $100 [solarbotics.com].