The Robotarium: Automation of a Remotely Accessible, Multi-Robot Testbed

The cost, in terms of both time and money, of instantiating a physical testbed can be prohibitive. To help resolve this issue, the Robotarium offers a free, remotely accessible robotics lab to users around the world. Since allowing the general public to use it, hundreds of users have submitted thous...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE robotics and automation letters Vol. 6; no. 2; pp. 2922 - 2929
Main Authors: Wilson, Sean, Glotfelter, Paul, Mayya, Siddharth, Notomista, Gennaro, Emam, Yousef, Cai, Xiaoyi, Egerstedt, Magnus
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Piscataway IEEE 01.04.2021
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Subjects:
Accessibility
Algorithms
Automation
Best practice
Collision avoidance
Hardware
methods and tools for robot system design
multi-robot systems
Multiple robots
Reliability
Robot kinematics
robot safety
Robotics
Robots
Software
ISSN:2377-3766, 2377-3766
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:The cost, in terms of both time and money, of instantiating a physical testbed can be prohibitive. To help resolve this issue, the Robotarium offers a free, remotely accessible robotics lab to users around the world. Since allowing the general public to use it, hundreds of users have submitted thousands of experiments. The current and accelerating experiment submission rate poses an operational challenge that cannot be handled through manual or human supervised execution without devoting a full time operator to the platform. A solution to this problem is enable the Robotarium to operate autonomously: improving the robustness and reliability of the system while reducing required human intervention to diagnose and recover from failures. In this pursuit, the hardware, software, and algorithms deployed on the Robotarium have undergone numerous developments, including a new differential-drive robot, the use of modern virtualization techniques for the software infrastructure, and the inclusion of robust constraint-satisfaction methods for long-term safe operation. Over the past year of autonomous operation, these advances have resulted in 0.76% of the 3402 submitted remote experiments failing and requiring human intervention to recover from. This paper details these development efforts and best practices that have been learned automating a remote-access testbed to keep up with the experimental demand of a large, active, and growing userbase.
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ISSN:2377-3766
2377-3766
DOI:10.1109/LRA.2021.3062796