Swarming BrushBots

The BrushBot is not alone anymore!

A team of 4 roboticists (Jeremy Cai, Yousef Emam, Siddharth Mayya and I) spent a Saturday building 32 differential-drive-like brushbots from scratch. See pictures below for the highlights of the day.

Flashing PCBs

Soldering motors

Mounting brushes

Box of completed BrushBots

The complete swarm

First test of the swarm

Wireless charging tests

Rome wasn’t built in a day, a swarm of BrushBots … almost!

Fully-actuated and differential-drive-like brushbot.

The two flavors of brushbots in the picture above are shown in action in the following video. A trajectory-tracking experiment features the fully-actuated brushbot, whereas 30 differential-drive-like brushbots are deployed to perform a coverage control task.