Abstract
Despite growing interest in collective robotics over the past few years, analysing and debugging the behaviour of swarm robotic systems remains a challenge due to the lack of appropriate tools. We present a solution to this problem—ARDebug: an open-source, cross-platform, and modular tool that allows the user to visualise the internal state of a robot swarm using graphical augmented reality techniques. In this paper we describe the key features of the software, the hardware required to support it, its implementation, and usage examples. ARDebug is specifically designed with adoption by other institutions in mind, and aims to provide an extensible tool that other researchers can easily integrate with their own experimental infrastructure.
Highlights
AND RELATED WORKDebugging robotic systems is an inherently complex task, and the traditional software debugging tools currently available are of limited use
We present a solution to this problem—ARDebug: an open-source, cross-platform, and modular tool that allows the user to visualise the internal state of a robot swarm using graphical augmented reality techniques
These problems are exacerbated when working with swarm robotic systems (Brambilla et al, 2013), where the quantity of debugging information required to locate and resolve a bug increases with the number of robots in the system
Summary
Debugging robotic systems is an inherently complex task, and the traditional software debugging tools currently available are of limited use. Connecting to a robot may allow an experimenter to capture detailed debug messages, but this kind of output can be difficult to correlate with the behaviour of the robot in real-time These problems are exacerbated when working with swarm robotic systems (Brambilla et al, 2013), where the quantity of debugging information required to locate and resolve a bug increases with the number of robots in the system. This paper presents ARDebug—a novel augmented reality tool that is designed for analysing and debugging the behaviour of swarm robotic systems, which builds on the success of Ghiringhelli et al (2014), offering a more generalised tool that can meet the requirements of a wider variety of swarm systems It provides an experimenter with a single intuitive interface through which they can view the internal state of robots in a swarm in real-time, making the process of identifying, locating, and fixing bugs significantly easier. Similar mixed reality (Hoenig et al, 2015) applications exist that allow robots to perceive augmented reality environments through the use of virtual sensors (Reina et al, 2015, 2017; Antoun et al, 2016), which can aid the debugging process through the creation of reproducible virtual environments, but ARDebug differs from these tools in its focus on presenting detailed debugging information to a human experimenter
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