This project, developing a new generation of mobile robots with wall-climbing and reliable communication capabilities, develops a set of miniature robots to be used as a research instrument suitable for a broad class of research in distributed robotics, mobile sensor networks, and reliable wireless communication. Transforming the present 2-D world of mobile rovers into a 3-D universe, this new generation of mobile robots operates on many types of surfaces, moves on floors, climbs walls, walks on ceilings, and transits between them. The robots contain highly capable, highly adaptive FPGA-based multiprocessors to support sensing, computing, communications, and dynamic reconfigurability or resources, enabling research and development in a wide range of tasks in urban search and rescue, surveillance, environmental monitoring, and planetary exploration. The wall-climbing robots consist of the FPGA-based multiprocessors with vision and wireless communication capabilities. The robots form a comprehensive testbed for measuring various sought-after metrics such as performance, QoS, and reliability in distributed robotics applications.
