The s-bot is a small (15 cm) differential wheeled (with additional tracks) mobile robot developed at the LIS (Laboratory of Intelligent Systems[2]) at the EPFLinLausanne, Switzerland between 2001 and 2004. Targeted to swarm robotics, a field of artificial intelligence, it was developed within the Swarm-bots project, a Future and Emerging Technologies project coordinated by Prof. Marco Dorigo. Built by a small team of engineers (Francesco Mondada, André Guignard, Michael Bonani and Stéphane Magnenat) of the group of Prof. Dario Floreano and with the help of student projects, it is considered at the time of completion as one of the most complex and featured robots ever for its size. The s-bot was ranked on position 39 in the list of “The 50 Best Robots Ever” (fiction or real) by the Wired magazine in 2006.[3]
This is a research robot, aimed at studying teamwork and inter-robot communication. To do this, the s-bots have several special abilities:
Using their gripper (red in the photos), they can connect. Then they can, for instance, pass over gap and steps where a single robot would have failed.
Using their integrated forcesensor, they can coordinate to retrieve an object to a certain location without the use of explicit communication. This is the way ants bring preys to the nest.
Of course, all other sensors and actuators, also found on other robots, can be used to do teamwork such as food foraging.
S-bots can connect to other s-bots to create a bigger structure known as the swarm-bot. To do so, they attach together using their rigid gripper and ring. An s-bot has sufficient force to lift another one.
Mondada, F., Pettinaro, G. C., Guignard, A., Kwee, I., Floreano, D., Deneubourg, J.-L., Nolfi, S. and Gambardella, L.M., Dorigo, M. (2004) SWARM-BOT: a New Distributed Robotic Concept. Autonomous Robots, special Issue on Swarm Robotics, Volume 17, Issue 2–3, September - November 2004, Pages 193 - 221. PDFArchived 2005-10-28 at the Wayback MachineBibTeX
