This paper describes the Robotarium -- a remotely accessible, multi-robot research facility. The impetus behind the Robotarium is that multi-robot testbeds constitute an integral and essential part of the multi-robot research cycle, yet they are expensive, complex, and time-consuming to develop, operate, and maintain. These resource constraints, in turn, limit access for large groups of researchers and students, which is what the Robotarium is remedying by providing users with remote access to a state-of-the-art multi-robot test facility. This paper details the design and operation of the Robotarium and discusses the considerations one must take when making complex hardware remotely accessible. In particular, safety must be built into the system already at the design phase without overly constraining what coordinated control programs users can upload and execute, which calls for minimally invasive safety routines with provable performance guarantees.
Numerous remotely accessible multi-robot testbeds with a focus on robot mobility have been proposed over the years - for example the Mobile Emulab @cite_0 , or the HoTDeC testbed @cite_20 . A comprehensive list of multi-robot testbeds can be found in @cite_1 . Generally speaking, testbeds in this domain contain robots that occupy a significantly larger footprint and are more expensive than the Robotarium robots, which is an inherent obstruction to using large numbers of robots. A GRITSBot can be built for approximately @math 100 - see the bill of materials at www.robotarium.org The main difference between these testbeds and the Robotarium, however, is that the Robotarium explicitly addresses the robot safety aspect of remote accessibility such that provable damage avoidance of the Robotarium's physical assets is guaranteed even with untrustworthy or malicious users. The testbeds mentioned above in principle allow remote access for cases where a user can be trusted to not damage the hardware but do not explicitly address the safety issues involved once users have been approved for use. Unlike these testbeds, the Robotarium is inherently safe to operate because built-in (online and offline) safety measures prevent users from causing accidental or purposeful damage to the robots.
@cite_0 @cite_1 @cite_20
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Simulation has been the dominant research method- ology in wireless and sensor networking. When mobility is added, real-world experimentation is especially rare. However, it is becoming clear that simulation models do not sufficiently capture radio and sensor irregularity in a complex, real-world environment, especially indoors. Unfortunately, the high labor and equipment costs of truly mobile experimental infrastructure present high barriers to such experimentation. We describe our experience in creating a testbed to lower those barriers. We have extended the Emulab network testbed software to provide the first remotely-accessible mobile wireless and sensor testbed. Robots carry motes and single board computers through a fixed indoor field of sensor-equipped motes, all running the user's selected software. In real-time, interactively or driven by a script, remote users can position the robots, control all the computers and network interfaces, run arbitrary programs, and log data. Our mobile testbed provides simple path planning, a vision-based tracking system accurate to 1 cm, live maps, and webcams. Precise positioning and automation allow quick and painless evaluation of location and mobility effects on wireless protocols, location algorithms, and sensor-driven applications. The system is robust enough that it is deployed for public use. We present the design and implementation of our mobile testbed, evaluate key aspects of its performance, and describe a few experiments demonstrating its generality and power. The growing interest in ubiquitous robotics has originated in the last years the development of a high variety of testbeds. This paper presents a survey on existing ubiquitous robotics testbeds comprising networked mobile robots and networks of distributed sensors, cameras and smartphones, among others. The survey provides an insight into the testbed design, internal behavior and use, identifying trends and existing gaps and proposing guidelines for testbed developers. The level of interoperability among different ubiquitous robotics technologies is used as the main conducting criterion of the survey. Other features analyzed include testbed architectures, target experiments and usability tools.