Sensing and Estimation on a Modular Testbed for Swarm Robotics

Collective robotics offers the promise of enhanced performance and robustness relative to that of individual robots, with decreased cost or time-to-completion for certain tasks. Having many degrees of freedom, the multi-robot control and estimation problems are challenging, specifically when the solutions require a great amount of communication among the robots. While numerical simulation is a critical tool in swarm robotics research, verification of obtained results under a physical realization of the swarm is far from routine. Therefore, we have developed and used a sensor-integrated testbed for the validation of cooperative-robotics algorithms, observation of swarm behavior, and measurement of system performance.