Low Cost
Robots are part of our cultural imagination, but a project by a group of students at Southampton University’s School of Electronics and Computer Science may change the way we see and use robots. A fourth year group have developed a new low cost model for producing robots for as little as £24.

Dr Klaus-Peter Zauner, who teaches on the Biorobotics course, says that the students are given enormous freedom to develop projects, ‘In the first semester a group of five students came up with the idea of making a swarm of little robots – a big challenge. Many researchers would like to have swarms of robots, but it is extremely expensive. It’s not just the parts, the expense is really within the assembly of a robot.’

Mobile Phones
The breakthrough insight was that they could use a standard piece of mobile phone equipment. ‘The students had this idea of exploiting the vibration motor of mobile phones as the main drive component for the robot,’ says Zauner. ‘There are no extra chassis components needed. It’s basically just a circuit board. The motors are placed onto the mobile phone circuit boards fully automatically, like any other electronic component.’

Because the robot can be constructed on a circuit board assembly line, it makes it cheap compared to conventional robot construction. The second major innovation was to simplify maintenance by getting the robots to collaborate. A single robot has lots of sensors to monitor itself but ‘if the robots are made to be in a swarm,’ says Zauner, ‘they have to be so cheap, the sensors would be a significant cost factor. Instead of a robot being able to test itself, it can try testing other robots, to collaborate. A simple example is one robot challenging another to walk a straight line and come back. If the robot veers left or right, it can tell the other robot. The robot that was walking off can adjust the relative speed of its two motors and recalibrate.’

Natural swarm
The way the swarm functions is based on nature, ‘the students drew on bees and ants for the inspiration of how the robots would switch between different tasks’, explains Zauner. There have been numerous inquiries from groups wanting to build these robots for research purposes, and they are looking to find some funding to take the research forward.