Overview:
        We propose to incorporate the swarming technology into a new competition called RoboSwarm which involves teams of robots competing against each other. This is currently planned to be an indoor competition but a future version of this could be done outdoors just as well. The design of the competition would facilitate several contests using the same robots and gameboard. The number of contests possible will always be growing as we entertain new ideas. The gameboard is the playing field where the robots interact and the teams compete against each other. At the moment, the starting size is  4' x 8' which is later possible to expand to a larger size where more robots can participate.

        The gameboard provides a kind of "real world" environment in a small scale for the robots to negotiate it's mission. Several common obstacles are used, such as, buildings, hills, bridges, etc. which the robots have to deal with. This contains a grid of RFID tags underneath which acts a kind of smart gameboard to allow the robots to determine their location. As such, the robots contain a RFID reader to allow it to interrogate any tag that it encounters to retrieve the data to correlate it's location. Future revisions of this competition which are held outdoors can make use of GPS units instead of RFID for positioning. The current robot design contain an array of sensors beyond this to allow it to interact with it's teammates and the opponents.

       
        Since this is the first revision of the competition, we defined a goal to make the robots affordable for most of the members within our group. As with any competition, the cost of the robot can become quite exorbitant, so with the first group of teams we decided to stick with a common design and rely on the cost savings by ordering the same parts in quantity. We wanted to include some of the novices as well as the experienced in a team. During our meetings, we plan to hold workshops and tutorials for building and programming the robots in preparation for the competition.