MRI: Development of the Robotarium: A Shared, Remote Access, Multi-Robot Laboratory

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In the near future, robot-assisted technologies have the potential to improve individuals' qualify of life in almost every aspect of society. However, in order to realize this future, access to instruments that enable discovery in the area of robotics must be ensured. In this regard, this project develops the Robotarium, a world-class, shared multi-robot research and education facility, remotely and locally accessible to users across different educational institutions and age groups. Through an online, open, public interface, users will be able to schedule and run their experiments, while being provided with both streaming video of the experiment as well as the scientific data produced through the experiment. The expected outcome is a first-of-its-kind multi-robot research platform that can be utilized by researchers, educators, and students, without incurring the prohibitive costs associated with setting up and maintaining a suitably-equipped research facility. Even more importantly, however, the expected outcome goes beyond access. A research instrument like the Robotarium has the potential to build stronger networks of collaborative research, thus making the whole significantly larger than the sum of its parts. As such, the end result has the potential to show how remote access research instruments can be structured in other areas beyond robotics.The Robotarium is an open, remote access multi-robot testbed that allows researchers and educators to run robotics experiments without having to incur the prohibitive costs associated with setting up and maintaining an actual research facility. In order to achieve this agenda, research instrumentation efforts in this project are pursued along three different dimensions that will come together to produce a first-of-its-kind open, remote access multi-robot research facility. These three dimensions are: (1) A remote access multi-robot laboratory where researchers, educators, and students can test and run their own coordinated control strategies; (2) Low-cost, high-performance mobile robots designed explicitly to support remote-access multi-robot research; and (3) Instrument development that has operational and cybersecurity primitives built-in, which is critical since remote users can literally take control of physical assets. The Robotarium will not only provide local and remote access to a multi-robotics facility, but it will also facilitate research in a number of areas that will directly benefit from the Robotarium research instrument, such as (i) swarm robotics, (ii) visualization and augmented reality, (iii) cybersecurity, (iv) cyber-physical systems, and (v) formal model-checking of real-time software.