Our approach to overcoming the disadvantages imposed by small robots is specialization and collaboration.
Specialization is achieved by exploiting the nature of a heterogeneous team.
Instead of equipping every robot with every sensor, computation, and communication capability, we are building robots that are each specialized for a particular aspect of the task. In one type of scenario, the robot team may be composed of robots with various range and position sensors but only limited computation capabilities. In this case these robots act as distributed sensor platforms remotely controlled by a team leader who performs the high-level planning. In another task, the same group of Millibots may be equipped with computational modules that provide local processing of data. Data is collected and stored locally until it can be retrieved.