Design Of A Cooperative Autonomous Mobile Robot System At The Undergraduate Level

This paper describes an undergraduate-level design project in a course on autonomous mobile robot systems. The project is intended to allow a great deal of latitude in implementation and to promote teamwork and integrated design methodologies in a framework that is both instructional and interesting. The technical challenges of the project include limited bandwidth communications, cooperative multi-agent algorithms, data storage and transmission and physical system design/control. Additionally, the project is structured in such a way as to provide the students experience in organizing large teams of cooperative designers and working with small task-dedicated design teams. This design project was a subcomponent of a course in Autonomous Robot Design in the Systems Engineering Department at the United States Naval Academy.