Abstract
In this paper, a remote lab for experimenting with a team of mobile robots is presented. Robots are built with the LEGO Mindstorms technology and user-defined control laws can be directly coded in the Matlab programming language and validated on the real system. The lab is versatile enough to be used for both teaching and research purposes. Students can easily go through a number of predefined mobile robotics experiences without having to worry about robot hardware or low-level programming languages. More advanced experiments can also be carried out by uploading custom controllers. The capability to have full control of the vehicles, together with the possibility to define arbitrarily complex environments through the definition of virtual obstacles, makes the proposed facility well suited to quickly test and compare different control laws in a real-world scenario. Moreover, the user can simulate the presence of different types of exteroceptive sensors on board of the robots or a specific communication architecture among the agents, so that decentralized control strategies and motion coordination algorithms can be easily implemented and tested. A number of possible applications and real experiments are presented in order to illustrate the main features of the proposed mobile robotics remote lab.
Highlights
Recent years have witnessed an impressive flourishing of remote laboratories for teaching and research purposes
This paper presents a remote lab for mobile robotics, which enjoys all the benefits of practicing with real robots, while at the same time minimizing the amount of work required to build a fully functional setup for multi-agent systems
The proposed multi-robot setup is embedded in the Automatic Control Telelab (ACT) [5,6], a remote laboratory developed at University of Siena for teaching purposes, aimed at providing a variety of remote experiments in the control systems field
Summary
Recent years have witnessed an impressive flourishing of remote laboratories for teaching and research purposes (see, e.g., [1,2,3,4]). The proposed multi-robot setup is embedded in the Automatic Control Telelab (ACT) [5,6], a remote laboratory developed at University of Siena for teaching purposes, aimed at providing a variety of remote experiments in the control systems field. The addition of such a facility enlarges the remote lab audience, attracting students involved in robotics courses. Besides presenting the main features of the multi-robot setup, a further objective of the paper is to illustrate several possible experiences available to the user, such as multi-agent coordination and decentralized control, pursuer-evader games and collision avoidance problems, and to show how they can be useful both for research and for teaching purposes.
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