An Integrated Testbed for Cooperative Perception with Heterogeneous Mobile and Static Sensors

Abstract

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.

A WSN-Based Tool for Urban and Industrial Fire-Fighting

“…The experiments were carried out in the CONET Integrated Testbed [31], see Figure 6 (left). The testbed ( http://conet.us.es ) is a remote open tool to assess and compare multi-robot and WSN methods.…”

On-Line RSSI-Range Model Learning for Target Localization and Tracking

“…It emulates a typical office smart environment scenario and is deployed in a room of more than 500 m 2 in the basement of the School of Engineering of Seville. UBILOC was developed on top of the CONET Integrated Testbed [22,23], and inherits from it its main characteristics.…”

On the Cooperation between Mobile Robots and Wireless Sensor Networks

“…Currently, the protocols and methods for the operation of the WSN and UAV flight plan computation, have been implemented and tested in the CONET Robot-WSN Integrated Testbed (https://conet.us.es) [1]. Some preliminary experiments in the field have also been carried out, see Figure 12.…”