In this paper, we present a small, light-weight, low-cost, fast and reliable system designed to satisfy requirements of relative localization within a swarm of micro aerial vehicles. The core of the proposed solution is based on off-the-shelf components consisting of the Caspa camera module and Gumstix Overo board accompanied by a developed efficient image processing method for detecting black and white circular patterns. Although the idea of the roundel recognition is simple, the developed system exhibits reliable and fast estimation of the relative position of the pattern up to 30 fps using the full resolution of the Caspa camera. Thus, the system is suited to meet requirements for a vision based stabilization of the robotic swarm. The intent of this paper is to present the developed system as an enabling technology for various robotic tasks.

This paper describes a design, development and experience with an universal multi-robotic robot control system. The overall message-driven system concept is introduced together with its open modular architecture. Besides the description of functionalities of basic modules, the approach to the system configuration and hardware abstraction layer is discussed. The control system allows to manage different types of robots in one team, whereas each team member is able to share and interchange any information with other team members. Since a lot of robotic tasks are computationally intensive and cannot be computed onboard, the system allows to distribute selected subtasks among remote computers. The system has been designed as a test-bed for research of new algorithms from an area of cooperative robotics.