The Blue Swarm

Book One

Volume

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 17

Robot Competition and Exhibition

There are a number of robotics applications that require covering a large area thoroughly and in a minimum amount of time. For these types of applications, a swarm of robots can be an ideal solution. The Utah State University entry in the Urban Search and Rescue competition is the Blue Swarm, named after the Utah State University mascot, "Big Blue". This swarm was developed as part of a two year engineering project, so the swarm being developed for the AAAI 2000 Robotics Competition is just an interim capability. This paper describes the current and planned capabilities for the Blue Swarm.