Abstract
Cooperation among devices with different sensing, computing and communication capabilities provides interesting possibilities in a growing number of problems and applications including domotics (domestic robotics), environmental monitoring or intelligent cities, among others. Despite the increasing interest in academic and industrial communities, experimental tools for evaluation and comparison of cooperative algorithms for such heterogeneous technologies are still very scarce. This paper presents a remote testbed with mobile robots and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) equipped with a set of low-cost off-the-shelf sensors, commonly used in cooperative perception research and applications, that present high degree of heterogeneity in their technology, sensed magnitudes, features, output bandwidth, interfaces and power consumption, among others. Its open and modular architecture allows tight integration and interoperability between mobile robots and WSN through a bidirectional protocol that enables full interaction. Moreover, the integration of standard tools and interfaces increases usability, allowing an easy extension to new hardware and software components and the reuse of code. Different levels of decentralization are considered, supporting from totally distributed to centralized approaches. Developed for the EU-funded Cooperating Objects Network of Excellence (CONET) and currently available at the School of Engineering of Seville (Spain), the testbed provides full remote control through the Internet. Numerous experiments have been performed, some of which are described in the paper.
Highlights
In the last years different technological fields have emerged in the broad context of embedded systems.Disciplines such as pervasive and ubiquitous computing, where objects of everyday use are endowed with sensing, computational and communication facilities, have appeared
The testbed presented in this paper provides full interoperability between robots and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) using an interface through which WSN nodes and robots can bidirectionally interchange data, requests and commands
Indoors experiment outside of the controlled testbed room [48] and outdoors experiments [49] were carried out. Some of these experiments focused on multi-robot schemes and some others on static WSN algorithms, the higher number of experiments performed concentrated on WSN-robot cooperation
Summary
In the last years different technological fields have emerged in the broad context of embedded systems. Cooperation among heterogeneous CO is not easy Devices such as mobile robots and WSN nodes present high levels of diversity in its sensing, computational and communication capabilities. One of the main difficulties in the research on CO is the lack of suitable tools for testing and validating algorithms, techniques and applications [2] In this sense, a good number of testbeds of heterogeneous mobile robots and of WSN have been developed. The paper describes a testbed for cooperative perception with sensors on mobile robots and on WSN. The testbed comprises sensors with high level of heterogeneity including static and mobile cameras, laser range finders, GPS receivers, accelerometers, temperature sensors, light intensity sensors, microphones, among others It allows equanimity among these elements independently of their sensing, computing or communication capabilities.
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