  Experiments using large numbers of miniature swarm robots are desirable to
teach, study, and test multi-robot and swarm intelligence algorithms and their
applications. To realize the full potential of a swarm robot, it should be
capable of not only motion but also sensing, computing, communication, and
power management modules with multiple options. Current swarm robot platforms
developed for commercial and academic research purposes lack several of these
critical attributes by focusing only on a few of these aspects. Therefore, in
this paper, we propose the HeRoSwarm, a fully-capable swarm robot platform with
open-source hardware and software support. The proposed robot hardware is a
low-cost design with commercial off-the-shelf components that uniquely
integrates multiple sensing, communication, and computing modalities with
various power management capabilities into a tiny footprint. Moreover, our
swarm robot with odometry capability with Robot Operating Systems (ROS) support
is unique in its kind. This simple yet powerful swarm robot design has been
extensively verified with different prototyping variants and multi-robot
experimental demonstrations.
