An Autonomous Mobile Robotics Testbed: Construction, Validation, and Experiments

<para xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> This paper describes design and construction of an Autonomous Mobile Robotics Systems Testbed in detail. The testbed is an indoor experimental platform for developing and validating theoretical as well as practical research work in identification, coordinative and cooperative control, trajectory generation, computational intelligence, and sensing for multiple autonomous mobile robotics systems. It provides a designated space for multiple mobile robots while tracking their position and orientation in real-time using an overhead vision system. Several problems encountered in developing the testbed such as multi-camera color consistency, radial lens distortion, hat pattern design are clearly addressed. The testbed is analyzed for its performance and several experiments with ER1 mobile robots are presented. </para>