Overview

Ive recently been thinking about a robotic project surrounding magnetic robots that build collectivley build shapes from user input.

The larger project can be broken down into 3 categories:

1. Pathplanning and algorithems:

   • How do the robots build the shape given end goal positions?
   • How do robots localize?

2. Networking and Communications:

   • How do the robots communicate with one another?
   • What serial protocols do they use?

3. Hardware

   • How do the robots connect and disconnet from one another?
   • What kind of board do they use?

While I wait for the hardware to start building on objective 2 and 3, I can start working on objective one with a simulation. Thus this blog is about category one: Pathplanning

In this project, I use the A* algorithem to calculate the optimal set of movements for each robot to take to build the target shape in the least number of moves. I then created a visual simulation to display the steps of the algorithem.