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Cooperation among devices with different sensing, computing and communication capabilities provides interesting possibilities in a growing number of problems and applications including domotics (domestic robotics), environmental monitoring or intelligent cities, among others. Despite the increasing interest in academic and industrial communities, experimental tools for evaluation and comparison of cooperative algorithms for such heterogeneous technologies are still very scarce. This paper presents a remote testbed with mobile robots and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) equipped with a set of low-cost off-the-shelf sensors, commonly used in cooperative perception research and applications, that present high degree of heterogeneity in their technology, sensed magnitudes, features, output bandwidth, interfaces and power consumption, among others. Its open and modular architecture allows tight integration and interoperability between mobile robots and WSN through a bidirectional protocol that enables full interaction. Moreover, the integration of standard tools and interfaces increases usability, allowing an easy extension to new hardware and software components and the reuse of code. Different levels of decentralization are considered, supporting from totally distributed to centralized approaches. Developed for the EU-funded Cooperating Objects Network of Excellence (CONET) and currently available at the School of Engineering of Seville (Spain), the testbed provides full remote control through the Internet. Numerous experiments have been performed, some of which are described in the paper.

This paper describes a testbed for general experimentation involving Cooperating Objects (COs). Its architecture considers all COs at the same level. It allows a multiple schemes including multi-robot, WSNs experiments and robot-WSN collaboration working as peers. Currently comprised of 6 mobile robots (5 Pioneer 3AT and one outdoor robot) and 40 static WSN nodes equipped with cameras (IEEE1394 for the robots and embedded cameras for the WSN nodes), laser rangers, and other sensors, it can be easily extended with other hardware due to the use of a modular architecture and standard software tools and interfaces. The testbed allows testing centralized and distributed techniques, is suitable for indoors and outdoors and can be accessed through the Internet for online remote monitoring and visualization. The main experiments already carried out, some of which are described in the paper, focused on cooperative perception and robot-WSN collaboration for network repairing.

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La escasez de herramientas experimentales adecuadas ha sido señalada como un factor crítico en el desarrollo de la robótica ubícua. Este artículo describe un banco de pruebas remoto para experimentación en robótica ubicua integrando robots con redes inalámbricas de sensores. El banco de pruebas está compuesto por 5 robots Pioneer 3-AT, por una red de cámaras y por una red inalámbrica de sensores, todos ellos equipados con una amplia variedad de sensores. La arquitectura del banco de pruebas permite una gran diversidad de esquemas de cooperación entre sus elementos abstrayendo sus particularidades y capacidades sensoriales, computacionales y de comunicaciones. Permite ejecutar experimentos con distintos grados de descentralización. El