Engineering swarms for mobile sensor networks

The road leading to a goal does not separate you from the destination; it is essentially a part of it. - Charles DeLint; The purpose of this research is to achieve the goal set forth in the MASnet program, namely, to design and build a cooperative team of mobile robots capable of sensing, modeling, predicting, and ultimately controlling a diffusion process. This work approaches several aspects of this high-level task including: hardware aspects of experimental equipment, a new camera calibration method for machine vision-based position feedback, experimental implementation of multi-vehicle cooperation via consensus algorithms, and finally a swarm engineering approach to developing a cooperative multi-vehicle team. Although the final destination of MASnet is not fulfilled in this work, the road traveled has produced encouraging results and exciting discoveries.