Quanta - A platform for rapid control and monitoring of heterogeneous rbots

Rapid prototyping, real-time control and monitoring of various events in robots are crucial requirements for research in the fields of modular and swarm robotics. A large quantities of resources (time, man power, infrastructure, etc.) are often invested in programming, interfacing the sensors, debugging the response to algorithms during prototyping and operational phases of a robot development cycle. The cost of developing an optimal infrastructure to efficiently address such control and monitoring requirements increases significantly in the presence of mobile robots. Though numerous solutions have been developed for minimizing the resources spent on hardware prototyping and algorithm validation in both static and mobile scenarios, it can be observed that researchers have either chosen methodologies that conflict with the power and infrastructure constraints of the research field or generated constrained solutions whose applications are restricted to the field itself. This paper develops a solution for addressing the challenges in controlling heterogeneous mobile robots. A platform named Quanta - a cost effective, energy efficient and high-speed wireless infrastructure is prototyped as a part of the research in the field of modular robotics. Quanta is capable of controlling and monitoring various events in/using a robot with the help of a light-weight communication protocol independent of the robot hardware architecture(s).