HeRo 2.0: A Low-Cost Robot for Swarm Robotics Research
This provides an incremental, low-cost tool for swarm robotics research and education, addressing practical application challenges.
The authors tackled the need for accessible swarm robotics platforms by designing HeRo 2.0, a low-cost, open-source robot using off-the-shelf components and ROS integration, and demonstrated its effectiveness in experiments with a couple of robots.
The current state of electronic component miniaturization coupled with the increasing efficiency in hardware and software allow the development of smaller and compact robotic systems. The convenience of using these small, simple, yet capable robots has gathered the research community's attention towards practical applications of swarm robotics. This paper presents the design of a novel platform for swarm robotics applications that is low cost, easy to assemble using off-the-shelf components, and deeply integrated with the most used robotic framework available today: ROS (Robot Operating System). The robotic platform is entirely open, composed of a 3D printed body and open-source software. We describe its architecture, present its main features, and evaluate its functionalities executing experiments using a couple of robots. Results demonstrate that the proposed mobile robot is very effective given its small size and reduced cost, being suitable for swarm robotics research and education.