Teaching Multi-Agent Robotics in the Robotarium-UCM
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17979/ja-cea.2025.46.12223Keywords:
Robotics, Autonomous robotic system, Mobile robots, Control education, Multiagent systems, Coordination of multiple vehicle systemsAbstract
This paper presents an extension of the Robotarium-UCM platform aimed at teaching multi-agent robotics through the integration of a distributed communication system based on the 0MQ library. The proposed architecture is built around a central server that acts as a logical switch, allowing the definition of virtual communication topologies between agents via directed graphs. These structures not only enable the implementation of flexible and realistic interactions between robots but also directly reflect the models used in consensus theory and multi-agent control, facilitating stability analysis through the Laplacian and similar tools. The implementation of this architecture has enabled the design of educational practices that are more closely aligned with the state of the art in cooperative systems research and development.
References
Acharya, S., Bharadwaj, A., Simmhan, Y., Gopalan, A., Parag, P., Tyagi, H., 2020. Cornet: A co-simulation middleware for robot networks. In: 2020 International Conference on COMmunication Systems & NETworkS (COMSNETS). IEEE, pp. 245–251.
Calvo-Fullana, M., Mox, D., Pyattaev, A., Fink, J., Kumar, V., Ribeiro, A., 2021. Ros-netsim: A framework for the integration of robotic and network simulators. IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters 6 (2), 1120–1127.
Casanova, H., Legrand, A., Quinson, M., 2008. Simgrid: A generic framework for large-scale distributed experiments, 126–131.
Dey, E., Hossain, J., Roy, N., Busart, C., 2022. Synchrosim: An integrated co-simulation middleware for heterogeneous multi-robot system. In: 2022 18th International Conference on Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems (DCOSS). IEEE, pp. 334–341.
Egerstedt, M., Reiss, J., Notomista, G., Schwager, M., Ames, A., 2017. The robotarium: A remotely accessible swarm robotics research testbed. In: Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA). pp. 1699–1706.
García-Pérez, L., Sombría, J. C., Fontán, A. G., Castellanos, J. F. J., 2023. Collaborative construction of a multi-robot remote laboratory: Description and experience. In: International Conference on Robotics in Education (RiE). Springer, pp. 243–254.
Jin, L., Qi, Y., Luo, X., Li, S., Shang, M., 2022. Distributed competition of multi-robot coordination under variable and switching topologies. IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering 19 (4), 3575–3586. DOI: 10.1109/TASE.2021.3126385
Mañas-Ávarez, F.-J., Guinaldo, M., Dormido, R., Dormido, S., 2023. Robotic park: Multi-agent platform for teaching control and robotics. IEEE Access 11, 34899–34911.
Milutinović, D., Rosen, P., 2013. Redundancy in Robot Manipulators and Multi-Robot Systems. Springer.
Olfati-Saber, R., Fax, J. A., Murray, R. M., 2007. Consensus and cooperation in networked multi-agent systems. Proceedings of the IEEE 95 (1), 215–233.
Ren, W., Beard, R. W., 2008. Distributed Consensus in Multi-vehicle Cooperative Control. Springer.
Selden, M., Zhou, J., Campos, F., Lambert, N., Drew, D., Pister, K. S. J., 2021. Botnet: A simulator for studying the effects of accurate communication models on multi-agent and swarm control. In: 2021 International Symposium on Multi-Robot and Multi-Agent Systems (MRS). pp. 101–109. DOI: 10.1109/MRS50823.2021.9620611
ZeroMQ community, 2025. ZeroMQ documentation. https://zeromq.org/, accessed: 2025-06-26.
Zhao, X., Tang, J., 2020. Networking of multi-robot systems: Architectures and requirements. IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials 22 (4), 2765–2790.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2025 Diego Villar Galán, Lía García Pérez, Jesús Chacón Sombría
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
