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

FORGE: An eLearning Framework for Remote Laboratory Experimentation on FIRE Testbed Infrastructure

The Forging Online Education through FIRE (FORGE) initiative provides educators and learners in higher education with access to world-class FIRE testbed infrastructure. FORGE supports experimentally driven research in an eLearning environment by complementing traditional classroom and online courses with interactive remote laboratory experiments. The project has achieved its objectives by defining and implementing a framework called FORGEBox. This framework offers the methodology, environment, tools and resources to support the creation of HTML-based online educational material capable accessing virtualized and physical FIRE testbed infrastruc- ture easily. FORGEBox also captures valuable quantitative and qualitative learning analytic information using questionnaires and Learning Analytics that can help optimise and support student learning. To date, FORGE has produced courses covering a wide range of networking and communication domains. These are freely available from FORGEBox.eu and have resulted in over 24,000 experiments undertaken by more than 1,800 students across 10 countries worldwide. This work has shown that the use of remote high- performance testbed facilities for hands-on remote experimentation can have a valuable impact on the learning experience for both educators and learners. Additionally, certain challenges in developing FIRE-based courseware have been identified, which has led to a set of recommendations in order to support the use of FIRE facilities for teaching and learning purposes

Maturity of health care testbeds – A qualitative mapping at the Nordic context

This qualitative mapping aimed to report health care testbed activities in Finland and two other Nordic countries and describe the maturity of these testbeds. The data were collected in 2021 with semi-structured interviews from twelve organizations, of which seven were university hospitals, four universities of applied sciences and one primary health care organization. The data were analyzed using deductive content analysis based on previously identified maturity factors: resources, facilities, marketing and communications, repeatability, contract models, certification and standards compliance and time at the market area. According to the results, there were testbed activities in all participating organizations. The testbed activities mainly were funded from various projects, and the staff mainly consisted of single employees. The testbed facilities were both real-life environments and test or simulation labs. The marketing and communications were based on web pages, social media, events and networks. The repeatability was ensured primarily with usability testing, and the contract models were under development in most organizations. Certification and standards of compliance were rare. Time at the market area was relatively short in many organizations as the activities were mainly testing single products or services rather than continuous co-creation. Testbed activities in the health care and higher education organizations are merging with the daily operations in Nordic countries. Specialization within the organizations was seen, for example, robotics, rehabilitation or medical devices. Testbed organizations highlighted the need for more structured and coordinated processes and activities in order to ensure the management, quality and effectiveness of their testbed services

Integrating a next-generation optical access network testbed into a large-scale virtual research testbed

Several experimental research networks have been created in the laboratories of prominent universities and research centres to assess new optical communication technologies. A greater value and research impact can be obtained from these testbeds by making them available to other researchers through research infrastructure federations such as GENI and/or FIRE. This is a challenging task due to the limitations of programmability of resource management and virtualisation software in most experimental optical networks. Fed4FIRE is an EU research project that makes it possible to create complex testbed scenarios that interconnect heterogeneous testbeds distributed physically all over the world. In this paper, we present a practical approach for the federation of a next-generation optical access testbed created at Stanford University called UltraFlow Access. That testbed offers its users both packet-switched and circuit-switched services while remaining compatible with conventional PONs. Our approach facilitates experimentation on the UltraFlow Access testbed in the context of large virtual testbeds using Fed4FIRE protocols.The research of this paper was partially financed by the European Union’s FP7 grant agreement no. 318389 Fed4FIRE Project, the National Science Foundation (grant no. 111174), NSERC, the Spanish projects CRAMnet (grant no. TEC2012-38362-C03- 01) and TIGRE5-CM (grant no. S2013/ICE-2919). The authors would also like to acknowledge the support of the Chair of Excellence of Bank of Santander at UC3M.European Community's Seventh Framework Progra

Creating a Worldwide Network For the Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) and Related Experimental Environments

Many important societal activities are global in scope, and as these activities continually expand world-wide, they are increasingly based on a foundation of advanced communication services and underlying innovative network architecture, technology, and core infrastructure. To continue progress in these areas, research activities cannot be limited to campus labs and small local testbeds or even to national testbeds. Researchers must be able to explore concepts at scale—to conduct experiments on world-wide testbeds that approximate the attributes of the real world. Today, it is possible to take advantage of several macro information technology trends, especially virtualization and capabilities for programming technology resources at a highly granulated level, to design, implement and operate network research environments at a global scale. GENI is developing such an environment, as are research communities in a number of other countries. Recently, these communities have not only been investigating techniques for federating these research environments across multiple domains, but they have also been demonstration prototypes of such federations. This chapter provides an overview of key topics and experimental activities related to GENI international networking and to related projects throughout the world