Syncing multiple Sparki's

Hello,
I am interested in syncing multiple sparki’s together and having them communicate among each other. For example, if one sparki detects an edge, it will be able to send a signal to the other sparki to not follow or to follow (depending on the signal) Does anyone have any suggestions of how this could be done ?

Any ideas are much appreciated!

Thank you

[quote=“lauren.a.mitchell”]Hello,
I am interested in syncing multiple sparki’s together and having them communicate among each other. For example, if one sparki detects an edge, it will be able to send a signal to the other sparki to not follow or to follow (depending on the signal) Does anyone have any suggestions of how this could be done ?

Any ideas are much appreciated!

Thank you[/quote]

It’s a challenging problem. If you had the Sparki’s “facing” one another, they can communicate using the IR emitter / receiver and the sendIR() / readIR() commands. That will only work if the fronts of the robots are more or less facing one another.

If you’ve got a way to connect your sparkis to a computer, you could communicate between and among those computers over a network. I wrote a library to do that with Python and a program running on Sparki, which you can see in another thread.

Someone on here has commented about putting a camera on Sparki. If you could mount a camera, you could do some image recognition (e.g. mark the sparkis with different colors and try to recognize the colors).

Good luck and hopefully somebody else has some more ideas!

IR is one way. Another is the radio module:
arcbotics.com/products/sparki/parts/radio/

Swam robotics isn’t popular enough to include it with every kit, but we sell it in the store.