HEYOOO

Hi. I'm Tharindu. I will be using this blog to document everything related to my MSc thesis project (new information, problems, solutions, implementation-related info, etc). I chose to start my project on this topic mainly because I was fascinated by the videos on YouTube showcasing swarms of robots working towards a shared objective. There were a few main characteristics of swarm robots I noticed during my short online video research, in swarm robotics,

• robots should operate locally: they don't care what other robots far away are doing
• the robots should be expendable; if a robot is KO, that should not affect the overall performance of the swarm.
• algorithms used should be scalable; the number of robotic agents should not affect the strategies
• reactive; the robot should respond to the environment as no central brain controls everything

If these features are considered at the same time during the robot design, the robot can be built at a low cost. Which means they will have a little amount of processing power and simple sensors. The algorithms running inside also have to be simple enough and should be lightweight. So in my research, I'm planning to come up with a lightweight algorithm that can be used by swarm robots to explore unknown environments to find a goal.

You may have noticed that I'm using a lot of qualitative characteristics like lightweight, simple, little, etc. I'll be finding exact values (or ranges) for these words down the way of my research.