Workshop: A Multi Robot Testbed for Computer Science Education and Research

The objective of this workshop is to share source code and tutorials that we developed for a multi robot testbed in order to enable participants to advance computer science education and research at their respective institutions. The testbed is built using commercially-available off the shelf components and using open source software packages. The workshop will provide participants an overview of multi robot systems and technical details underpinning the development of the testbed, including: technical specifications of the m3pi mobile robot and its capabilities, programming the LPC 1768 microcontroller, the grid navigation libraries, and the XBee-based communication libraries. We demonstrate how the testbed is being used to develop and test multi robot path planning in a grid world. We also present our initial development of a robot tracking algorithm using OpenCV.