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ChromaVertexBuilding a Swarm of Curious Little Robots |
I lead the Deep Dive Guild at Melbourne TechGuilds, a group of people who enjoy understanding why things work, not just how to build them. One of our long-term projects is ChromaVertex, a network of collaborative mobile robots.
The ChromaVertex idea is simple:
Could a group of inexpensive robots (we call them VertexBots) learn to find one another, organize themselves, and perform interesting collective behaviours using only what they can see?
None of us expects to solve every difficult robotics problem overnight, and that’s exactly the point. The fun comes from building the robots together, experimenting with algorithms, learning new mathematical ideas, discovering what works (and occasionally finding out why something doesn’t). In truth, the robots are just the excuse. The real project is learning together.
Why Build This?
Impressive commercial robots and sophisticated research platforms already exist, and we have no intention of competing with them. Instead, ChromaVertex is about bringing together curious people who enjoy exploring challenging ideas, one colourful little VertexBot at a time.
By keeping the hardware inexpensive and the software open, everyone can build a VertexBot (or two), take it home, modify it, and contribute new ideas.
Going as Deep as You Want
A guiding principle of the project is that everyone can participate at their own level:
- Some members may simply enjoy assembling the hardware.
- Others may design new 3D-printed parts.
- Some will experiment with programming on the ESP32.
- Others might dive into camera calibration, sensor fusion, graph theory, localisation, formation control, or synchronization algorithms.
There is always another layer waiting to be explored.
I keep a ChromaVertex Project Journal documenting the project’s progress, experiments, successes, and occasional failures.
Here is the project’s github repository: https://github.com/asekerci/chromavertex (The source code is licensed under the GPL-3.0 licence).
