Development Of A Miniature Robot For Multi-Robot Occupancy Grid Mapping

In this paper, we describe the design and evaluate the performance of Orion, a miniature sized differential drive robot for performing Intelligent Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) tasks. The robot has a footprint of 12 x 12 cm and weighs a total of 150 grams. It is able to navigate over two dimensional surfaces and perform indoor environment sensing using a custom build laser based ranging module. It uses log-odd occupancy and an inverse sensor model for occupancy grid map construction. We show that with our developed system, the robot is able to perform mapping in a closed environment. We also show how multiple of such robots can be extended to perform multi-robot mapping. This is our first step in the development of a multi-robot system for indoor space mapping using an embedded system architecture.