Development of a Prototype Swarm Robotics System for Cooperative Mapping of Indoor Environments in Research Institutions in Lagos State

Swarm robotics represents an emerging paradigm in autonomous systems research, offering scalable and fault-tolerant solutions for tasks such as environment mapping that would be inefficient or impossible for a single robot. This project presents the development of a prototype two-robot swarm system designed for cooperative indoor environment mapping in research institution facilities within Lagos State, South West Nigeria. Each robot in the swarm is built on a differential-drive chassis equipped with ultrasonic sensors for obstacle detection, an infrared sensor for ground feature detection, and a Bluetooth communication module for inter-robot data exchange. An Arduino Mega microcontroller on each robot implements a reactive navigation algorithm that allows simultaneous mapping of different sections of the environment while sharing boundary and obstacle data with the partner robot. The cooperative mapping algorithm was implemented to merge partial maps from both robots into a unified grid map displayed on a connected laptop. The system was demonstrated in a 15-by-10-metre indoor corridor environment at the Lagos State University Faculty of Engineering. Mapping completeness achieved by the two-robot swarm in 12 minutes was 76 percent of the accessible floor area, compared to 52 percent achieved by a single robot in the same time window. The study discusses communication latency and synchronization challenges between robots and proposes a ZigBee replacement for the Bluetooth link in larger swarm configurations. Keywords: swarm robotics, cooperative mapping, indoor navigation, multi-robot system, Lagos State