Large scale MEMS robots cooperative map building based on realistic simulation of nano-wireless communications

The Claytronics project has produced interesting hardware components like cylindric micro-robots called catoms and software models to enable the concept of programmable matter. One application is the use of several catoms linked together so that they can ``walk''. These walkers can explore an area and thanks to electromagnetic wireless nano-networks, they can communicate with each other sharing the map of the place to explore. In this paper, we study the different parameters influencing the transmission quality of the map to a sink which uses both traditional wireless and wireless nano-communication networks. (c) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.