An Experimental Testbed for Robotic Network Applications

In the last few years, multi-robot systems have augmented their complexity, due to the increased potential of novel sensors and actuators, and in order to satisfy the requirements of the applications they are involved into. For the development and testing of networked robotic systems, experimental testbeds are fundamental in order to verify the effectiveness of robot control methods in real contexts. In this paper, we present our Networked Robot Arena (NRA), which is a software/hardware framework for experimental testing of control and cooperation algorithms in the field of multi-robot systems. The main objective is to provide a user-friendly and flexible testbed that allows researchers and students to easily test their projects in a real-world multi-robot environment. We describe the software and hardware architecture of the NRA system and present an example of multi-mission control of a network of robots to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

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