An Integrated Multi-Robot Test Bed to Support Incremental Simulation-Based Design

Design of complex systems calls for systematic methods as well as supporting environments to experiment with, understand, and evaluate them. For robotics systems that include a large number of robots, an integrated simulation-based design environment will greatly simplify the transitions from robot model experiment to real robot deployment and execution. This paper presents the development of an integrated multi-robot test-bed to support an incremental simulation-based design methodology that includes conventional simulation, robot-in-the-loop simulation, and real robot experiment. We describe the hardware, software, and system architecture of this integrated test bed. and present a multi-robot dynamic team formation example to demonstrate the usage of this platform along the different stages of the design process.