CONET Integrated Testbed

Objetive:

The development of a common Integrated Testbed to be used within the community is one of the most important issues of CONET. Although most partners already have individual testbeds in their own labs, there is no single physical environment that can be used for Cooperating Objects. This gap will be closed by the CONET Testbed and the Testbed Integration activities.

Thus, the main objective of the task, lead by AICIA, is to develop a common testbed for cooperating objects. The following main elements are involved in the IT: 5 autonomous robotic systems and a set of static and mobile WSN nodes. All these cooperating objects have diverse sensing, computation and wireless communication capabilities. The robots also have sensor nodes, being mobile nodes of the network. This testbed will make possible the research, development, testing, validation and comparison of different techniques, algorithms and applications regarding cooperative objects. The CONET Integrated Testbed, in operation since September 2009, is located in AICIA premises in Seville, Spain.

Software Architecture:

The IT is equipped with hardware and software elements to support interactions between them. The software architecture is based on Player, a set of Open Source software tools for robot and sensor applications which runs in Ubuntu 8.04.2 LTS and includes drivers for all sensors and actuators. User programs are developed in Java or C/C++. Player is used as the CO hardware abstraction layer and thus, the addition of new hardware to this software architecture is practically straightforward. 

The IT User has freedom in the program and and functionalities development of the robots and the WSN, including the definition of the WSN internal messages. The only assumption made is that the messages used to send and receive data out of the WSN should comply with the IT WSN-Player Driver interface for their correct interpretation. This interface is simple and versatile enough to fulfill the requirements of a wide range of experiments designed for the testbed. In the IT specification step. The architecture of the IT does not impose explicit constraints on the operating system of the WSN apart from the compatibility with Mica2 nodes.

The IT offers a basic software infrastructure which include basic robot and wsn functions as well as a set of tools required to manage, monitor and visualize, simulate and log and re-play any IT remote experiment. The remote experiment management is done through this site. The monitoring utilities include a launcher, a robot viewer, a camera capturer and a WSN GUI, allowing the visualization of all data gathered by the IT cooperating objects. The logging functionalities are automatically done in each cooperating object, allowing the re-play of the logged experiments. Both, log files and experiment re-play are done through a Player Driver.