Vision Based Area Discovery with Swarm Robots

Nowadays the need for autonomous robots has increased rapidly. These robots should have different types of sensors, thus their functionality can be extended. In order to process the data coming from the sensors, the robots require a proper processing hardware. However, the cost of a unique on-board controller system, which is able to handle advanced algorithms, is relatively expensive. Our proposal is to attach an inexpensive commercial mobile device to the robot, which has a high-resolution camera and advanced processing unit for different types of operations. In this paper we will present a vision-based model for environment discovery using homogeneous, medium scaled swarm of robots by using the on-board camera of the controller-smartphone. We introduce an extended axiom system based on bio-inspired swarm models, which optimizes the energy consumption of the swarm.