A Matlab-based remote lab for multi-robot experiments

Experimental validation is often crucial for establishing the effectiveness and robustness of algorithms for mobile robots. Unfortunately, it is generally difficult to let students use experimental setups, due to expensive hardware, complexity of usage and, not last, safety aspects. Often, experiments require the supervision of a tutor, and have to be carried out during the laboratory opening time. A possible way to overcome such limitations is to resort to remote labs. In this paper, a remote lab for controlling a team of mobile robots is presented. It is based on the Matlab environment and the mobile robots are built by using the LEGO Mindstorms NXT technology. Despite its low cost, thanks to its open architecture the proposed setup is versatile enough to be used in several kinds of experiments, ranging from single-robot to multi-robot systems, from centralized to decentralized control schemes. Users may connect to the remote lab and test their own algorithms in an easy way, by simply designing a Matlab function, without spending time on hardware aspects. A user interface allows them to observe the running experiment, and to download experimental data for offline analysis.