An integrated testbed for heterogeneous mobile robots and other Cooperating Objects

This paper describes a testbed for general experimentation involving Cooperating Objects (COs). Its architecture considers all COs at the same level. It allows a multiple schemes including multi-robot, WSNs experiments and robot-WSN collaboration working as peers. Currently comprised of 6 mobile robots (5 Pioneer 3AT and one outdoor robot) and 40 static WSN nodes equipped with cameras (IEEE1394 for the robots and embedded cameras for the WSN nodes), laser rangers, and other sensors, it can be easily extended with other hardware due to the use of a modular architecture and standard software tools and interfaces. The testbed allows testing centralized and distributed techniques, is suitable for indoors and outdoors and can be accessed through the Internet for online remote monitoring and visualization. The main experiments already carried out, some of which are described in the paper, focused on cooperative perception and robot-WSN collaboration for network repairing.