A Mini-sized Agent Testbed for Applications in Mobile Robotics

In the last years, the growing interest in consensus and coordinated control of multi-agent mobile systems has originated the development of a variety of testbeds. These experimental platforms constitute an essential component in the research and education process in the robotics field. This paper describes the design and implementation of a testbed based on the position control and trajectory tracking of mini-sized ground robots. The testbed architecture consists of a monitoring system composed by a web cam and a control algorithm running in a main computer that communicates with the robots wirelessly. A unique feature of the testbed is the use of ArUco markers on top of the mobile platforms for motion tracking purposes using OpenCV and Visual Basic. Additionally, the testbed has a user graphic interface that allows to manage and visualize results of the robot behavior for the tracking of different pre-defined trajectories.