Safe, Remote-Access Swarm Robotics Research on the Robotarium

This paper describes the development of the Robotarium -- a remotely accessible, multi-robot research facility. The impetus behind the Robotarium is that multi-robot testbeds constitute an integral and essential part of the multi-agent research cycle, yet they are expensive, complex, and time-consuming to develop, operate, and maintain. These resource constraints, in turn, limit access for large groups of researchers and students, which is what the Robotarium is remedying by providing users with remote access to a state-of-the-art multi-robot test facility. This paper details the design and operation of the Robotarium as well as connects these to the particular considerations one must take when making complex hardware remotely accessible. In particular, safety must be built in already at the design phase without overly constraining which coordinated control programs the users can upload and execute, which calls for minimally invasive safety routines with provable performance guarantees.Comment: 13 pages, 7 figures, 3 code samples, 72 reference

The Robotarium: A remotely accessible swarm robotics research testbed

This paper describes the Robotarium - a remotely accessible, multi-robot research facility. The impetus behind the Robotarium is that multi-robot testbeds constitute an integral and essential part of the multi-robot research cycle, yet they are expensive, complex, and time-consuming to develop, operate, and maintain. These resource constraints, in turn, limit access for large groups of researchers and students, which is what the Robotarium is remedying by providing users with remote access to a state-of-the-art multi-robot test facility. This paper details the design and operation of the Robotarium and discusses the considerations one must take when making complex hardware remotely accessible. In particular, safety must be built into the system already at the design phase without overly constraining what coordinated control programs users can upload and execute, which calls for minimally invasive safety routines with provable performance guarantees

The KALI multi-arm robot programming and control environment

The KALI distributed robot programming and control environment is described within the context of its use in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) telerobot project. The purpose of KALI is to provide a flexible robot programming and control environment for coordinated multi-arm robots. Flexibility, both in hardware configuration and software, is desired so that it can be easily modified to test various concepts in robot programming and control, e.g., multi-arm control, force control, sensor integration, teleoperation, and shared control. In the programming environment, user programs written in the C programming language describe trajectories for multiple coordinated manipulators with the aid of KALI function libraries. A system of multiple coordinated manipulators is considered within the programming environment as one motion system. The user plans the trajectory of one controlled Cartesian frame associated with a motion system and describes the positions of the manipulators with respect to that frame. Smooth Cartesian trajectories are achieved through a blending of successive path segments. The manipulator and load dynamics are considered during trajectory generation so that given interface force limits are not exceeded

Robotics Education and Research at Scale: A Remotely Accessible Robotics Development Platform

This paper introduces the KUKA Robot Learning Lab at KIT - a remotely accessible robotics testbed. The motivation behind the laboratory is to make state-of-the-art industrial lightweight robots more accessible for education and research. Such expensive hardware is usually not available to students or less privileged researchers to conduct experiments. This paper describes the design and operation of the Robot Learning Lab and discusses the challenges that one faces when making experimental robot cells remotely accessible. Especially safety and security must be ensured, while giving users as much freedom as possible when developing programs to control the robots. A fully automated and efficient processing pipeline for experiments makes the lab suitable for a large amount of users and allows a high usage rate of the robots