A Research Tool for the Power and Performance Analysis of Sensor-Based Mobile Robots

Contemporary sensor-based robotic systems tend to use an ad-hoc combination of off-the-shelf components for onboard computational needs. The number and type of sensors present, the number and organization of the onboard processors, and the algorithms utilized for processing high bandwidth real-time sensor data present researchers and designers with a wide range of choices for which they are currently ill-equipped to evaluate the best options. We present a co-simulation framework for sensor-based mobile robots that allows for the power and performance analysis of custom embedded computing platforms for mobile robots with a range of onboard sensors. We demonstrate the utility of our co-simulation framework by analyzing the power and performance tradeoffs for the computational subsystem of a quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with onboard camera sensor performing image processing tasks while operating in a custom virtual testbed.